Theorizing the political dimension of collaborative governance

Abstract Collaborative governance research is attentive to the role that conflict, power, and politics play in collaboration processes, but, in our understanding, the approach to these issues can best be summarized as a “stakeholder deliberation perspective.” Collaborative governance theory can be enriched and its application expanded by opening it up to a wider range of perspectives on “the political” and “politics” that place antagonistic conflicts at the heart of their ontology. Doing so will help to illuminate what collaboration means as a “tool or strategy of problem-solving” and will shed new light on the limitations and potentials of collaborative governance as a “new form of politics” that is relevant even to contentious policy fields. Systemic theories of democratic deliberation, theories of political pluralism, and theories of political negotiation that consider how actors make joint decisions—despite fundamentally different political views and ideas—can enrich and add nuance to our understanding of the political dynamics in and around collaborative governance.