Join us for a webinar hosted by the Collaborative Governance thematic stream working group, titled “Investigating horizontal conflicts: Tackling socio-environmental conflicts where roles are complex and changing” with Maria Mancilla Garcia. The webinar will take place on Tuesday, June 3, 2025 at 8:30am Mountain Time (Arizona – UTC-7). Register here to attend via Zoom.
More information on the webinar:
Investigating horizontal conflicts: Tackling socio-environmental conflicts where roles are complex and changing
Environmental conflicts have been studied from a multiplicity of perspectives within the different sub-disciplines of environmental studies. Within Political Ecology, for example, there is a long tradition of studying the root causes of environmental conflicts as well as their transformative potential as a process that might give voice to marginalized actors or allow them to craft alliances beyond the apparent borders of the conflict. Within managerial approaches to environmental governance, conflict has often been seen as a problem to solve or to avoid, and influenced by deliberative perspectives, participation has been presented as a way forward to address potential conflicts. In this presentation, I would like to develop a theoretical perspective on conflict that considers it as entangled with collaboration, where roles and relationships are complex and intertwined. I use the idea of “horizontal conflicts” as a way to convey the multiplicity of responsibilities and positions that such a type of conflict entails, where power endowments are ambiguous and changing. I bring to the discussion reflections from several cases, namely our work with coastal communities in Kenya and Mozambique where we used Forum Theatre as a research method to investigate horizontal conflicts, my collaboration with colleagues using a diversity of methods to understand the eutrophication crises of the Mar Menor Lagoon in Spain and the associated management decisions, and preliminary analysis of interview and observation data from a new project focusing on the conflict between fisheries management and seal and cormorant conservation in the Swedish Baltic Sea.
Maria Mancilla Garcia is a researcher and theme leader at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Her research covers theoretical work on process-relational perspectives, i.e. perspectives that put the emphasis on the role of ever-evolving relations in crafting and changing social-ecological systems, with a focus on conflict and collaboration dynamics understood as entangled. Maria’s research investigates a diversity of empirical governance cases related to water and sea governance with special attention to the role of street-level public officers. She uses a multiplicity of methods, which range from network analysis and traditional qualitative research methods such as semi-structured interviewing, to more innovative ones such as co-production dialogues and arts-based approaches. She reflects on her engagement with theoretical, empirical, and methodological advancements through her work as theme leader for the theme Doing Sustainability Research: The How. Maria is an environmental social scientist with a background in political science, development studies, and philosophy, but has always worked in collaboration with natural scientists, especially marine biologists, ecologists, and ecological modellers.
