Innovation Unlimited? Working Across Boundaries in a Case of Collaborative Governance on the ‘Youth Domain’

This paper studies how collaborative governance might take place in synergy with the routines and practices of “normal” policy making. We investigated if and how discursive and extra-discursive boundaries from bureaucratic and organizational silos were crossed in boundary concepts, objects and people. Moreover, we studied the limits to this type of collaboration in a case of collaborative governance on the youth domain” – youth welfare and youth care – in the Dutch city of Amsterdam. In this case, participants were confronted with restrictions to their innovative ways of cooperating. The paper addresses the limits and dilemmas that organizers and participants in collaborative governance ran into when faced with the routines and practices of “normal” policy making. Moreover, we seek possible solutions to these dilemma’s and to the boundaries to collaborative governance both from a theoretical point of view and from the practices of the participants in collaborative governance.