Multi-agency collaborations in government routinely face three challenge types — substantive problem-solving, collaborative process, and multi-relational accountability — that impose paradoxical, seemingly contradictory demands. A quasi-experimental action-research study of eight Dutch crime-fighting collaborations found that teams making progress coped by adopting a 'both/and' mindset rather than an 'either/or' one, but could not determine which interventions or contextual conditions reliably induce that mindset, could not separate intervention effects from heterogeneous starting conditions, and could not establish generalization beyond its setting. The open problem is to close these gaps: empirically identify the interventions and conditions that stimulate both/and coping under designs that support causal attribution, and test whether the paradoxes and coping patterns travel to other collaborative-governance domains.

Background

Collaborative governance denotes governing arrangements in which public agencies engage actors from other public organizations, private firms, and civil society in joint, consensus-oriented decision-making and implementation, typically to address 'wicked' societal problems that no single agency can solve alone. The collaborative-governance literature (e.g., Ansell and Gash 2008; Emerson, Nabatchi and Balogh 2012) identifies recurring challenges of three kinds: substantive problem-solving challenges (what to do about the problem itself), collaborative process challenges (how to work together across organizational boundaries), and multi-relational accountability challenges (how to answer simultaneously to one's home organization, the collaboration, and societal stakeholders).

Paradox theory (Smith and Lewis 2011, Academy of Management Review) describes paradoxes as contradictory yet interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and persist over time; they cannot be 'solved' once and for all but must be continually navigated. A 'both/and' mindset means accepting and engaging opposing demands simultaneously — for example, sharing information to build trust while legal caution demands withholding it — instead of choosing one pole ('either/or' thinking). In public administration this tension is sharpened because public servants work with one foot in traditional bureaucracy and one in networked governance.

Waardenburg, Groenleer, de Jong and Keijser (2020, Public Management Review 22(3):386–407) studied eight multi-agency crime-fighting collaborations in the Netherlands for 18 months using a quasi-experimental action-research approach: the researchers deliberately intervened (coaching sessions, structured problem-solving support, a distinct collaborative space, tailor-made accountability mechanisms) while following each collaboration's formation and functioning, and then compared responses across teams. They confirmed that the three challenge types manifest in practice as paradoxical demands, and observed that collaborations able to make progress transcended the paradoxes through a both/and mindset, while others remained paralyzed. However, the eight teams differed in their starting conditions — the crime problem chosen, team composition, and historical and political context — so the study could not attribute differences in coping to the interventions rather than to context, and its setting (Dutch crime-fighting, partly created for the research) left generalization open. Later conceptual work has codified paradoxes across collaborative-governance research (Qi and Ran 2024) and theorized paradox mindset — an individual's tendency to accept and engage contradictory yet interdependent elements — as a micro-foundation of transformative collaboration (Birman 2026), but both explicitly frame the empirical questions as a research agenda rather than answering them.

Problem Statement

Determine, through empirical study of real multi-agency collaborations, (1) which interventions — beyond the basic support structure of a structured problem-solving process, a distinct collaborative space, and tailor-made accountability mechanisms — and which contextual conditions reliably stimulate the adoption of a 'both/and' mindset and thereby effective coping with the paradoxes of collaborative governance (substantive problem-solving, collaborative process, and multi-relational accountability paradoxes), including where differences in coping between collaborations actually come from; (2) establish these claims with research designs that separate intervention effects from variation in starting conditions, so that systematic comparison and causal statements become possible; and (3) test whether the paradoxes and coping patterns identified in Dutch crime-fighting collaborations generalize to collaborative governance in other domains and countries. The deliverable is a research design for such an empirical study, not a report of empirical findings: it must specify (a) the interventions and contextual conditions to be tested, (b) the design that would separate intervention effects from variation in starting conditions, and (c) the cross-domain design that would test generalization. All three components are independently mandatory and jointly serve one objective — learning how multi-agency collaborations can be helped to cope with governance paradoxes; addressing only one component does not resolve the task.

References

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