Public sector collaboration is widely recognised as essential for addressing complex societal problems, improving service delivery, and fostering innovation. Yet sustaining collaboration over time remains difficult because stakeholders differ in mandates, interests, power, and institutional positioning, while policy and governance environments continue to shift. This paper offers a conceptual discussion of how public sector collaboration can be sustained through evolving stakeholder engagement and compromise dynamics. Drawing on an integrative synthesis of collaborative governance, stakeholder engagement, and public value literature, the paper develops a stage-based conceptual framework consisting of four stages: initiation and stakeholder mobilisation; alignment and relationship building; operational coordination and adaptive adjustment; and renewal, institutionalisation, or decline. The framework highlights how stakeholder engagement changes across stages and how compromise functions as a central mechanism for maintaining alignment and collective action when conditions change. The paper contributes to collaborative governance scholarship by reframing sustainability as a dynamic achievement rather than a fixed outcome, by advancing a stage-sensitive understanding of stakeholder engagement, and by positioning compromise as a core governance mechanism in the durability of collaboration. The paper concludes with implications for public managers and directions for future research on adaptive and digitally mediated collaboration.

Keywords

Public sector collaboration; stakeholder engagement; collaborative governance; compromise dynamics; sustainability.