Finally Throwing Those Wellies Away? Collaborating in Search of a Solution for Venice Flooding

Collaborative governance is often advocated as a way to address ‘messy’ problems that individual stakeholders cannot solve alone. However, whereas stakeholders’ participation brings a broad range of response options to public decision-making, the complexities of the perspectives at stake may also lead to conflicts and stalemates. This is especially true in collaborative environmental governance, where conflict is common and stakeholders’ interdependence in more than one arena tends to be frequent. Based on a longitudinal field study, we explore how to break stalemates in collaborative environmental governance when they occur, and move the collaboration towards a shared decision. The successful collaborative decision-making for the defence of Venice against floods represents our empirical setting. Our findings show that, in this context, the combined effect of three factors seems to be important to break stalemates and lead stakeholders towards a shared decision in collaborative environmental governance: stakeholders’ reactivation, fear of marginalization and leaders acting as orchestrators.