Latent, collaborative, or escalated conflict? Determining causal pathways for land use conflicts

While land use conflicts can present a tedious burden for land management processes, they also fulfill important functions for society, such as making different perspectives visible or driving innovation. As we cannot avoid all conflicts, we therefore need to learn how to address them in ways that diminish their negative impacts. However, a comprehensive understanding of the causes of different dynamics in land use conflicts is presently absent. The aim of this paper, then, is to explore the configurations of conditions that explain latent, collaborative, and escalated dynamics in land use conflicts. To achieve this, we adopt Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to evaluate 37 land use conflicts in the city of Cottbus and the surrounding Spree-Neiße administrative district in eastern Germany. We detect six causal pathways: two each that explain latent, collaborative, and escalated outcomes. Our findings particularly emphasize the explanatory relevance of actors’ possibilities to participate in conflicts and to influence conflict outcomes, of their willingness to cooperate, and of their resources. These results are a first step toward a theoretical explanation of different dynamics in land use conflicts; they are also of practical relevance, informing policy-makers, planners, and land users on how to foster collaborative outcomes.