Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are designed through contracts but governed over time through relationships, institutional constraints, stakeholder scrutiny, and recurrent adaptation. This creates a persistent public-management problem: contractual alignment may establish responsibilities and incentives without ensuring that a partnership can remain governable when conditions, expectations, or conflicts change. This article develops an original non-empirical collaborative governance model that reconceptualizes PPP resilience as a proposed capacity to preserve workable coordination, legitimate public accountability, and adaptive response under institutional complexity and stakeholder conflict. The analysis distinguishes contractual governance, relational governance, institutional pressures, public-value safeguards, and adaptive capacity rather than treating them as interchangeable substitutes. It argues that resilience depends on contingent complementarity: formal mechanisms can stabilize expectations and allocate responsibilities, while relational mechanisms can support interpretation, coordination, and negotiated adjustment; either may become counterproductive when overextended, misaligned, or detached from accountability requirements. The proposed model also treats disruption and renegotiation as diagnostically ambiguous, because they may signal either adaptive recalibration or governance breakdown depending on process quality, power distribution, and safeguard preservation. The contribution is a multilevel architecture linking governance modes, institutional pressures, collaborative behavior, and legitimacy constraints while preserving level-of-analysis and temporal boundaries. The model is not presented as empirically validated, universally applicable, or implementation-ready. Its value is explanatory and heuristic rather than predictive, and its propositions require comparative and longitudinal validation.
