Scratching the Surface of Collaborative and Associative Governance: Identifying the Diversity of Social Action in Institutional Capacity Building

Recent work on ‘collaborative planning’ has concentrated on applying Habermas's work on communicative action to the realm of urban and regional governance. This work has its parallels in other disciplines, notably geography, where institutional capacity building has been considered as part of local systems of governance. Both bodies of work are premised to a degree on the rationality of communication. Habermas contrasted his ideas on the possibilities for communicative action with the widespread presence of ‘strategic behaviour’ in social relations. The dual nature of governance as both an institutional and a political activity means that consideration of such strategic forms of behaviour is essential to a deeper understanding of the nature of collaborative and associative forms of governance and their outcomes. What social scientists refer to as ‘teleological/strategic action’, ‘normatively regulated action’, and ‘dramaturgical action’ together with communicative action are all integral to collaborative governance. In this paper, we consider examples of the manner in which institutional capacity has been exercised in attempts to attract a major inward investment project into the United Kingdom. The example illustrates the range of social actions that are present beneath the surface of collaborative and associative governance. More specifically, our example highlights the structuring of institutional and organisational interactions through the strategic behaviour of a dominant local organisation.