Abstract
While calls for cross-sectoral collaboration have become a recurrent motif in sustainability-oriented policymaking and research, the practical realization of such processes presents significant challenges. The hope for “collaborative advantage” often gets traded for the experience of “collaborative impasse”, namely those moments in which collaboration gets stuck. To better understand the reasons underlying such impasses, the study focuses on the impact of facilitation artefacts—objects designed and used in collaborative practices. The study proposes an analytical heuristic of collaborative practices to investigate the data collected in an explorative study, tracing artefacts across three different communicative modes of deliberation. Detailed analysis of the case, grounded in audio–visual material, semi-structured interviews, photo documentation, and participatory observation, shows that such artefacts substantially influence the structure of the emerging interaction order in a given setting, and that unscripted and unsituated artefacts might contribute to reinforcing those communicative patterns that collaboration aims to contrast. The study identifies three relevant practices in facilitation work, in order to steer emerging interaction orders away from exclusionary dynamics: scripting, situating, and supervising. Although emerging from the micro-analysis of artefacts, these practices might apply to other spheres of collaboration and serve as orientation for successful collaborative processes.
Highlights
Calls for cross-sectoral collaboration have become a recurrent motif of sustainability-oriented policymaking and research, as reflected in the discourses around co-design [1,2], co-creation [3,4], co-production [5], and collaborative governance [6,7,8]
The researchers planned to use the same kind of facilitation artefacts for the collection of results for all groups, in order to generate a constant variable among them
Via abductive grounded theorizing, we formulate the following arguments: (1) The presence or absence of artefacts in the room has a substantial influence on the structure of the emerging interaction order; (2) The very same artefacts are interpreted and used differently within different emerging interaction orders; (3) Unscripted and unsituated artefacts might contribute to reinforcing those communicative patterns that collaborative interaction orders aim to overcome; (4) Purposefully scripted and situated artefacts require constant supervision by the facilitator, in order to embed them in their emerging interaction order
Summary
Calls for cross-sectoral collaboration have become a recurrent motif of sustainability-oriented policymaking and research, as reflected in the discourses around co-design [1,2], co-creation [3,4], co-production [5], and collaborative governance [6,7,8]. Both research and practice reveal experiences of “collaborative impasse”, namely those moments in which collaboration gets stuck [14]. These moments can derive from a multitude of reasons, often intertwined with each other and entangled in a bundle of diverse dynamics. Understanding these dynamics behind collaborative advantage and collaborative impasse is of both theoretical and practical importance, and can help to address the challenge of ’learning to collaborate while collaborating’ [15,16,17]
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