Tinkering with tensions: boundary work and collaborative governance

Collaboration is everywhere: it is inherent to working with colleagues, negotiating with partners in the field, and addressing complex societal issues that cross sectoral boundaries. Although collaborative governance has been popularized as a panacea for societal issues in literature and practice, establishing and maintaining collaboration ‘on the ground’ involves a contentious process that may bring about as many problems as it resolves.

Processes of collaboration are complex due to challenges in (re)arranging interaction across organizational, sectoral, and hierarchical boundaries. These boundaries often function as rallying points for the different or competing meanings of collaborating actors. A boundary work lens can help shed light on actors’ divergent meaning-making processes and therefore increase our understanding of the intricate dynamics of collaboration.

In this dissertation, Sarah van Duijn examines the dynamics of a case of collaborative governance following a large health care reform that spans the health and social care sectors. She studies how unacquainted decentral actors, as well as central actors, engage in different forms of boundary work as they attempt to establish, maintain, and resist collaboration from its initial phases onwards.

Throughout its empirical analysis, this study provides new insights into the interplay between different forms of boundary work and shows how collaborative governance is a process that requires actors on multiple levels to continuously tinker with tensions as they draw, contest, uphold, or erase boundaries in order to organize (or refrain from) interaction.

First, the study underlines the value of adopting an interpretive and processual approach for studying collaborative governance: ‘following’ the meaning-making processes of actors working towards collaboration over time allows both for understanding their continuous renegotiations – over the boundaries between them, as collaborating actors – and for revealing their potentially diverging perspectives. As such, an interpretive and processual approach provides insight into how and why actors may be (un)able to work towards collaboration.

Second, it further develops the interconnectedness between different forms of boundary work, i.e., between decentral forms, which take place between collaborating actors, and central forms, which involve attempts to create and constrain the options available to collaborating actors. By better understanding boundary work on these different levels, we are also better able to understand the links between different forms of boundary work and the enduring tensions involved in collaborative governance.

Third, the dissertation explains how different forms of boundary work, on the one hand, and the enduring tensions in collaborative governance, on the other hand, can be mutually informative. This also brings to light a new form of boundary work: counter-configurational boundary work, a term for the responses of decentral actors to the configuring actions of central actors.