ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 positions theories of governance and discursive institutionalism in a framework of conflict to understand how collaboration among diverse political stakeholders can be contingently instituted. As an example of this ‘conflictual collaboration’, the collaborative governance exercise of distributing incremental funds from the City Tax, a tourist overnight tax introduced in Berlin in 2014, is examined. Within the process of collaboratively designing an artist grant scheme, the Koalition was temporarily engaging in the procedural realm of policy-making to coproduce the material policy outcome, the so-called Arbeits- und Recherchestipendien (Working and Research Grants). The Conflictual Consensus Matrix is reintroduced to frame the conflictual yet collaborative formation of ‘conflictual consensus’ between the cultural administration and the Koalition at the example of the City Tax distribution. The chapter conceptualizes ‘agonistic policy networks’ as a mode of informal governing, which not only disaggregates types of legitimation leveraged from the CityTax2015 process along the lines of input, throughput and output, but foregrounds the centrality of conflict in collaborative governance efforts. Beyond this singular ‘success’, the expanded inclusion of informal, precariously legitimated civil actors such as the Koalition is illustrative of shifting positionalities and practices of all political stakeholders affected by policy-making (i.e., legislature, executive, civil society).
