Organized Consultation Below the Collaborative-Governance Threshold: Differentiated Participation and Documentary Standardization in Albania’s Administrative-Territorial Reform 2.0

Administrative reforms increasingly organize consultation without achieving collaborative governance, yet the two are rarely distinguished claim by claim. This article asks how a temporary parliamentary reform body organizes participation across arenas and transforms contributions into a common administrative record while retaining centralized formal authority, and it reads the result against European consultation standards. We conducted an abductive, interpretive, Gioia-informed document analysis of 44 canonical invitations, minutes, and summaries linked to 23 event identifiers in Albania’s Administrative-Territorial Reform 2.0, auditing 40 transformation probes across five complete invitation–minutes–summary chains with a second-coder check. None of the 33 traceable propositions retained speaker attribution in the corresponding summary, 32 of 33 retained geographic context, 13 of 14 applicable conflict markers remained visible (11 of 16 under adjudicated coding), and all five sampled interaction rules were absent from the summaries. Two constructs are grounded: asymmetric responsiveness (the unequal allocation of documented opportunities to obtain a response, contest an interpretation, supplement evidence, or revise the record) and documentary standardization. In form, the process resembles consultation the Council of Europe has judged Charter-compliant, but it falls below the collaborative-governance threshold: the consultation-phase record shows no shared authority, joint action, policy uptake, or durable collaborative capacity.