"What Do We Do Now?" Transferable Design Features for Relational Action-Research Practices in Messy and Ambiguous Policy Situations Where Policy-Practitioners Find Themselves Stuck in Paralysis Over What To Do Next

Ambiguous and messy policy-situations such as care- and welfare services in problematic urban areas; planning in a dense area or the prevention of juvenile delinquency, can easily lead to impasses of even conflicts in the collaboration between policy-practitioners and other stakeholders that are dependent upon each other to get things done (Rein, 2009; Roe, 2013, Van Hulst and Yanow, 2016). Facilitative actionresearch practices that organise ‘research in the moment’ (Mackewn, 2008) by applying interpretive and deliberative strategies, can offer opportunities to find breakthroughs in these situations by moving away from more conventional, rational strategies -that emphasise truth-seeking and risk-avoidance- and focussing on collaborative sensemaking (Yanow,1996, Fischer and Forester, 1993; Forester 1997, 2003; Hajer and Wagenaar, 2013; Forester and Laws, 2016; Yanow, 1996). The relational aspect of the practices is more and more understood as important in these practices (Forester, Kuitenbrouwer, Laws, 2019, Bartels and Wittmeyer, 2019; Wagenaar 2019, Bartels and Turnbull 2019). By taking the relational dynamics as a diagnostic starting point, policy-practitioners can focus on the question ‘how did we get in this situation together’ and subsequently ‘how can we get out of this situation together’ that can help in finding a collaborative action frame. However, critique includes that the emphasis upon the ‘situatedness’ and ‘context-relatedness’ of these settings leads to a lack of methodological and transferable guidelines (Loeber 2007: 57). This paper explores transferable design features for relational action research in situations where policypractitioners need to collaborate in present and future, but where they find themselves stuck in paralysis over what should be done in the future and how to get there. A first diagnosis reveals that underlying feelings uncertainty over the future that caused for paralysis are not so much the result of a lack of strategic visioning, information or future scenario’s, but rather the result of the fear for unpredictable behaviour of others. Relational action-research based interventions, that make use of frame-reflective methods and focus upon possible dynamic interactions in the future, can assist policy-practitioners that feel paralysed by uncertainty to find a primary frame for action and finding breakthroughs out of the impasse.