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

Abstract

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.