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Article published In:
Practices of Dialogue, Dialogues in Practice
Edited by Alain Létourneau, Geneviève Boivin and Nicolas Bencherki
[Language and Dialogue 13:2] 2023
► pp. 200–228

“I don’t know if we should have that discussion now”

Negotiating procedural frames in collaborative governance of natural resources

| Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
| Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
| Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
| Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

Collaborative governance within natural resource management relies on dialogical forums where people can negotiate complex issues through conversations. In this paper, we investigate situations where procedural frames around these discussions are negotiated in the conversations between its participants in a corpus from five different natural resource management contexts. We present how frame discussions are initiated, how actors express that actions are not aligned with the frames, and finally, how these openings of discourse about the frames are interactively managed, maintained, and closed. We argue norms of inclusiveness, consensus, and performance shape the interaction and hamper the joint investigation of the frames, and undermine the entire justification of the collaborative processes and the core quality of dialogical conversations.

Keywords: collaborative process, dialogue, procedural frame, natural resource management, negotiation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Collaboration and normative dialogue in natural resource management
  • 3.Method
  • 4.Empirical contexts of collaborative governance
  • 5.Findings – Negotiating frames
    • 5.1Initiating frame negotiations
    • 5.2Pointing out frame transgressions
    • 5.3What happens when frames are brought up for discussion?
  • 6.Discussion and recommendations
  • Acknowledgement
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 1 August 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00147.hal
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