Collaboration has emerged in recent years as a public administration trend of utmost importance (O’Leary, Gerard, and Bingham 2006). The growing complexity of contemporary social issues, dispersed expertise to address them, technological innovations, administrative fragmentation, and overlapping jurisdictions, among other factors, appear to have rendered collaborative arrangements indispensable to our present-day practice of governance (McGuire 2006). “If the 20th century was the era of the administrative state”, Koontz and Thomas (2006) assert, “then the 21st century may be the era of the collaborative state” (p. 111). This collaborative trend, however, seems to have gone against the grain of the American political tradition of conflictual contestation of competing interests and adversarial legalism (Kagan 1991) that, notwithstanding recent criticism, has retained its relevancy in governance. Consequently, it has presented public managers with the challenge of dealing in reality with the simultaneous influence of two equally important, yet opposing managerial tendencies. As a result, the contextual complexity of political, administrative and policy situations has been often left unmatched by corresponding behavior complexity (Hooijberg and Quinn 1992) - capacity to apply simultaneously different, even mutually exclusive, strategies. Theoretically, with the notable exception of Connelly, Zhang, and Faerman’s (2008) paradoxical approach to collaboration, the current literature on the subject appears lacking in its conceptual apparatus to adequately capture this aspect of the competing values of rival strategic choices. At the core of this paradoxical approach, which draws on Quinn et al.’s (2003) Competing Values Framework of Organizational Effectiveness, is the notion that mutually exclusive phenomena can coexist in any organizational or inter-organizational setting, and managers should accordingly accept this reality as inevitable and learn to embrace it, rather than reject it. Thus, given the general importance of the topic of collaboration in public administration and management and the particular analytical and conceptual appeal of bringing the complexity of the paradoxical perspective to the treatment of collaboration, the purpose of the study is to contribute to the further development of the nascent paradoxical approach to collaboration. Environmental policy, in general, and pollution control through watershed management, in particular, provides the research setting for the study, as this is the policy area, which, arguably, has contained the most pronounced paradoxical interaction of collaboration with conflict in recent years (Weber 1998; Lubell 2004; Imperial 2005; Sabatier 2005). The research involves analysis and interpretive account of the paradoxical features of collaboration as identified in an empirical case study of an authentic, collaboratively-crafted policy initiative - the Patuxent River, Maryland Nutrient Control Strategy. Nationally recognized as a landmark case in collaborative “environmental action” (Hodge 1987, 5) and “environmental management policy in the U.S.” (D’Elia 1995, 164), the Patuxent River policy initiative has nevertheless featured intense scientific controversy, litigation, stakeholder conflict and contestation on the local, state and federal levels of governance. Therefore, the case has been deemed particularly appropriate to provide an empirical context for exploring the paradoxical concurrent interplay of both collaborative and conflictual elements present in the process of public policymaking and management
