Governing Collaboration. Communicative Dynamics Within Engagement Formats in University Alliances

University alliances strongly accelerate the broader trend of universities toward deeper engagement with actors beyond academia, especially at the regional level (Chou and Ravinet, 2015; Park, 2025). Locally embedded university alliances, in particular, position themselves as active partners in regional development (Moawad and Schendzielorz, 2026; Moawad and Gollanek, forthcoming). To pursue this role, they use an evolving set of carefully facilitated and evaluated engagement formats, such as get-togethers, workshops and panel discussions, both on and off campus. These events serve multiple purposes, as they aim to both raise awareness of the alliance among a non-academic audience and to position it as a single voice in the local landscape. Our contribution draws on the communicative turn in governance theories (Bang, 2003). Communication is essential in modern governance, as public policies often operate by signalling rather than enforcing (Offe, 2012; Ringen, 2008). This is no one-way process but an interaction between multiple participants in various landscapes that could be considered communicative arenas (see Börzel, 1998). Communicating, for university alliances, often means translation to foster, for instance, better civic engagement. They eventually integrate intermediaries in the engagement process, such as local governments (municipalities) and facilitators (think tanks, foundations). Against this backdrop, our core question is: How do communicative practices within engagement formats shape the governance role of local university alliances in regional development? Drawing on twelve qualitative semi-structured interviews with staff members responsible for moderating such formats and orchestrating exchanges in three German local university alliances, our contribution identifies different approaches, as well as practical challenges, recurring role tensions, and interactional dynamics that shape the practice of collaborative engagement enacted by alliances. Based on this cross-case analysis, we broadly outline general features of engagement formats in local university alliances and contrast them with the commonly articulated ambitions for such engagement activities. The widely shared ambition to initiate voluntary participation from different stakeholders to solve societal problems appears to be a natural and self-evident mode of collaboration; yet, this often comes with barriers and tensions, as raised by our interviewees. Also on a theoretical level, such an approach represents only one specific variant among potential alternative modes of collaboration, which we would like to briefly point out. As will be shown, the distinctive features of such approaches are highly functional for alliances, as they enable a low-risk and cost-effective implementation of their general action programmes and strategic goals. Overall, our contribution foregrounds the lived, communicative, and interactional culture of an alliance, whereas debates about governance in both research and practice typically remain focused on organisational structures, formal mandates, and contractual arrangements. Inquiry into the communicative and situational dynamics enacted within these formats offers an important, yet largely overlooked (Hartzell et al., 2023; Hermann et al., 2024) lens for understanding the ‘mission-oriented’ governance of university alliances. Our paper contributes to an understanding of governance in university alliances that is grounded in engagement formats as institutionalised communicative processes. The given insights may be relevant for the design and expectations of collaboration formats in higher education.