A systematic review of policy conflict and its (un)productive consequences
2026-06-29
Like most collective decision-making processes, the formulation, adaptation, and implementation of public policies are not immune to conflict. Recently, various authors have lamented the lack of explicit attention to conflict in the policy process and called for more research into how policy conflicts unfold and what consequences they produce. This article contributes to that scholarship in two ways: first, through a systematic discussion of empirical studies on the consequences of policy conflict since 2000; and second, by bringing into conversation insights that are currently dispersed across fragmented research traditions. The systematic literature review focuses on three aspects: how and where policy conflicts have been studied; whether and how they have been conceptualised; and what their consequences are. In doing so, the article highlights the often overlooked productive potential of policy conflicts. Policy conflicts are studied primarily in relation to issues of the (built) environment, where contestation has been shown to produce detrimental effects such as trust erosion, frustration, and disengagement. Supporting an agonistic understanding of conflict, however, they have also been shown to drive productive outcomes such as policy change, stakeholder engagement, policy learning, and innovation. This study contributes to bridging policy conflict scholarship across theoretical perspectives, advancing empirical understanding of policy-conflict consequences, and raising awareness of their productive character in both theory and practice.