Stakeholders’ learning and transformative action when developing a collaboration platform to provide welfare services

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article investigates stakeholders’ learning and transformative action when developing a collaboration platform between a Swedish regional authority organisation (RAO) and civil society organisations (CSOs) to find new ways to provide welfare services. The material is based on 22 semi-structured interviews and observations of seven general meetings at which RAO officials and CSO representatives met. In addition, notes were taken during two workshops with key stakeholders and interviewees, respectively. Learning and transformative action were analysed through a TADS approach. The findings reveal that a signed agreement, stipulating collaboration between the two sectors (public and civil society) became a second stimulus for shared transformative agency. After signing the agreement, conflicts of motives arose, which challenged learning between stakeholders. Surprisingly, it was not the conflicts of motives between the two sectors, but those within each sector that constituted the most severe expansive learning challenges, and consequently also a delay in the development of the collaboration platform that was to provide welfare services. Nonetheless, the conflicts also contributed to small, incremental, steps of transformative action toward what they had set out to do.