Playing for common ground: boundary games for inter-municipal cooperation

Inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) is increasingly necessary in European local governance, yet sustained coordination among autonomous municipalities remains difficult amid institutional fragmentation, divergent interests, and unequal capacities. While games have a recognized history in governance, planning, and learning contexts, their potential as deliberately designed infrastructures for sustained inter-institutional coordination remains underexploited. This paper asks: How can games function as boundary infrastructures to enable sustained inter-municipal cooperation? Through theory synthesis, the paper develops a conceptual framework that positions games as deliberate boundary infrastructures for inter-institutional coordination. Illustrated through the Comunità del Friuli Orientale in Friuli-Venezia Giulia (FVG), the framework articulates five mechanisms (clarifying complexity, sustaining motivation, facilitating cooperation, encouraging inclusion, and building collective knowledge) together with eight cross-cutting design principles that guide how these mechanisms are translated into playable and institutionally relevant forms. The paper’s core contribution is to reframe serious games (SGs) not as one-off participatory or learning events, but as infrastructures that can mediate pragmatic coordination challenges among autonomous public organizations, including divergent interests, power asymmetries, and conflicting institutional logics. In this way, the paper extends SG scholarship toward inter-institutional coordination and offers a conceptual basis for future empirical research on game-based cooperation in fragmented governance settings.