This paper examines an eight-year partnership to foster learning in street-level bureaucracy between researchers and policy practitioners in Amsterdam. The partnership began as an exploration of the shared insight that conflicts offer important moments of opportunity for renegotiating relationships on the street. The effort to learn from cases of public conflict included reflection and invention through ethnographic case studies, training and capacity building. This paper reviews this collaborative policy research and explores two insights that emerged. The first is that learning in these settings is invariably a process of remaking. It demands engaging and remaking habits of action, professional frames, and organizational routines that reimagine practices for negotiating conflicts. The second insight concerns the important role that improvisation plays in learning. Inventions in conflict—driven by practical demands of action—provided important breaks with convention that deepened the exploration of commitments and informed the effort to imagine new action repertoires.
