Enacting Conflicts: Analysing learning in a system innovation initiative for sustainable public private water governance in the city of Amsterdam

There has been little theoretical and empirical exploration of conflicts in learning processes related to system innovation for sustainability. Recently however, several scholars urge to reconsider learning as a process of deliberative collaboration, because of the normative and radical character of sustainability transitions provoking fierce conflicts. Together with these researchers we argue that conflicts often stem from essential differences between participants in a system innovation initiative and that the way participants enact disagreement and acknowledge dissonance is an important aspect of their transformative potential. In this presentation article, we investigate the role of conflict in an urban system innovation initiative for climate adaptation in order to answer the following central research question: What types of conflicts occur in the interaction in a system innovation initiative and how do the ways of participants to handle them influence the learning process?