The Collaborative Conflict Cycle: A Processual Perspective on Conflict in Collaborative Governance

Abstract Despite the positive effects of knowledge exchange and joint fact finding, collaborative governance is not free from power struggles and conflict. While recent scholarship acknowledges that conflict is constitutive of politics and not a pathology, there is a lack of explanations on why conflict sometimes strengthens collaborative processes and at other times destabilizes them. This paper argues that one reason for this gap is that existing frameworks treat conflict too statically, rather than as a dynamic phenomenon that plays out differently across stages of the collaborative process. Drawing on recent critiques in collaborative governance literature, this paper develops a processual perspective on conflict in collaborative governance. The argumentation follows three steps. First, it revisits existing conceptualizations to distinguish productive from unproductive policy conflict. Second, drawing on the policy cycle heuristic and collaborative governance literature, it outlines a simplified sequence of interactive stages in collaborative governance processes. Third, these stages are brought together into a cyclical conceptual model that hypothesizes how and why conflict is expected to play out (un)productively across stages of collaboration. By offering a processual and stage-sensitive account of conflict, the paper provides a conceptual basis for understanding when conflict is likely to be productive or destabilizing across stages of collaboration, with implications for the design and management of collaborative processes.