Political processes aimed at collaboratively addressing complex environmental issues are inherently dynamic and emergent. In these contexts, collaboration and conflict often coexist, significantly shaped by the behaviors and communications of the involved actors, power struggles, and the broader discourses present in various media. Recent insights from relational research emphasize the importance of analyzing cooperation and conflict in tandem, rather than focusing solely on collaboration. However, this interplay in political networks is ambiguous. This workshop aims to facilitate a dialogue among diverse relational approaches, exploring how these perspectives can illuminate the intricate dynamics of collaboration and conflict that influence environmental governance.
Studying the interplay between collaboration and conflict is still rather ambiguous; for instance, a lack of collaboration or trust does not necessarily imply the presence of conflict, while, conversely, conflict or disagreements can sometimes catalyze collaboration. Relational approaches in environmental governance research encompass a diverse array of conceptual and methodological tools focused on exploring social relationships and (evolving) structures. Quantitative methods, such as statistical analysis and network analysis, have been employed to investigate patterns of actor interactions and to empirically test hypotheses related to cooperation and conflict. Qualitative approaches, including in-depth interviews, cultural studies and ethnographic research, have offered nuanced insights into the constructed meanings behind social relationships, the contextualized actions of individuals and their interactions. While various governance frameworks apply relational approaches to study interactions between multiple actors, many network-centric frameworks only emphasize collaboration, or assume succeeding collaboration as the primary goal in addressing the relevant problem, potentially overlooking the critical role of conflict. This workshop seeks to explore the intricate relationships between collaboration and conflict in environmental governance, using different analytical approaches that explicitly take the (multiple) relationship(s) between actors into account. We want to broaden our knowledge by bringing insights from a wide range of relational approaches that provide diverse conceptualizations for collaboration and conflict - from their respective focus and discipline, yet not sufficiently connected. These approaches can help address several pressing questions and facilitate stock taking of conceptualizations, mixed-methods or additional theoretical concepts that need to be included when studying collaboration and conflict.
1: How are conflict and collaboration studied and operationalized in empirical research on political networks?
2: What insights about conflict and collaboration can be derived from different research approaches and methods?
3: Which factors drive changes from conflictive to collaborative relationships in conflictual starting situations?
4: What triggers collaborative or conflictive situations to emerge and how can conflicts be meaningfully managed?
5: How do discourses and narratives shape conflict and collaboration in environmental governance, and vice versa?
1: Examining the interdependent nature of collaboration and conflict in environmental governance settings;
2: Investigate conceptual development concerning collaboration and conflict from various research streams
3: Exploring and applying new mixes of methods to analyze the interplay of collaboration and conflict and its outcome
4: Exploring possibilities for syntheses and comparability of different data sets
5: Exploring different conditions for conflict leading to potentially different types of conflict and their outcomes
6: Examine the role of power and diverse roles and behavior of actors in relation to conflict or collaboration settings
7: Examining the impact of discourses and narratives on the actor interaction
