Building collaborative governance from scratch: the significance of recalibration and reaffirmation in boundary work

This paper examines the dynamics of actors’ boundary work in collaborative governance. While widely studied, how actors navigate collaborative governance from its inception has been underexplored. Drawing on a longitudinal ethnographic study tracing actors’ struggles over boundaries in response to a collaboration mandate, this paper demonstrates (1) how the design (configurational boundary work) of collaborative governance inadvertently and sometimes adversely affects the collaboration; (2) how collaborative governance remains ‘under construction’ as actors switch between competitive and collaborative boundary work; and (3) how actors continually engage in ‘recalibration’ and ‘reaffirmation’ of boundary work in response to changing circumstances, tasks, and actors.