Agonistic failures: Following policy conflicts in Berlin’s urban cultural politics

The paper intervenes in critical policy studies to challenge the ‘success bias’ lingering in public policy accounts of collaborative governance. I suggest conflict, rather than consensus, is a productive resource to navigate collaborations between state and civic stakeholders. By developing a conflict-oriented framework that foregrounds political decisions as always-already failing – regardless of whether promoted as success or failure – I argue that the recognition of nuanced conflicts contributes to new understandings on what counts as success or failure to whom. To substantiate the conflict-oriented framework of policy failure, I present empirical insights into Berlin’s urban cultural politics, shedding light on a new funding instrument for artists. Unpacking artists’ and administrators’ understandings about what constitutes a failure, and how to proceed from there, I propose ‘policyfailing’ as ongoing failure. Conceptualising failure along the lines of operational conflicts (i.e. concrete, procedural disagreements) and meta conflicts (i.e. overarching, ideological differences), two scenarios of policy failure emerge: absolute policy failure, pointing to unsolvable conflicts between state and civic stakeholders; and agonistic policy failure, referring to wider-ranging disagreements about the purpose of policy issues, which are however transferred into temporary policy solutions. Following one such agonistic policy failure in Berlin over time, I show how new opportunities for both absolute and agonistic policy failure unfold. Ultimately, I outline the practical, political and analytical potential of an agonistic framework to understand policies as inherently contested and, to some degree, always failing.