Navigating Inter‐Municipal Collaboration Challenges: ‘In‐Tensions’ in Shared Service Center and Joint Venture Arrangements

ABSTRACT Municipal collaborations such as shared service centers and joint ventures are widely promoted as ways to strengthen local service capacity. Yet they often develop in uneven and sometimes unstable ways. This paper examines why arrangements built on similar institutional promises take such different trajectories in practice. Drawing on a qualitative study of five inter‐municipal collaborations, we analyze how tensions emerge and persist through processes of framing, entanglement, disentanglement, and overflow. We identify three recurrent in‐tensions—strategic, governance, and service—that illustrate how collaborative work is continually pulled between competing concerns and expectations. Rather than viewing difficulties as implementation failures, we show that instability is an inherent feature of collaborative organizing, arising from the ongoing effort to balance autonomy with interdependence across multiple principals, operative units, and service users. The paper contributes a practice‐oriented explanation of why inter‐municipal collaboration often remains fragile and highlights how persistent tensions shape the possibilities for sustaining joint arrangements over time.