April 2026

Collaboration is one of the most widely accepted ideas in environmental governance. When faced with a complex problem, the instinct is almost always to bring stakeholders together and work toward a shared solution. When that process fails the response is often to “collaborate harder”. But what if that instinct is sometimes counterproductive? What if the sheer number of collaborative initiatives is stretching participants so thin that none of them achieve very much? And what if the conflicts that collaboration is supposed to resolve are actually being deepened by the process itself?

To explore these questions, I spoke with previous guest Örjan Bodin, Professor at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. Örjan's research examines how networks of actors collaborate — or fail to collaborate — around environmental problems, and what determines whether those efforts lead to meaningful outcomes. We discuss why collaboration is not always the best response to every problem, how conflict and cooperation coexist, the role of power imbalances in shaping outcomes, why trust takes far longer to build than most initiatives allow for, and whether the small, incremental wins that feel unsatisfying might actually be the best path to lasting progress.

Links to resources

• Polycentric systems for coping with collective action and global environmental change - 2010 Ostrom article about the benefits of small initial gains.

• A population ecology of network domains. Public Management Review - 2023 article on the issue of ever-increasing number of collaborative venues.

• Reconciling Conflict and Cooperation in Environmental Governance: A Social Network Perspective - 2020 article by Örjan and others on the interplay between conflict and collaboration, and its (partial) separation in scholarly work on environmental governance.

• Collaborative environmental governance: Achieving collective action in social-ecological systems - 2017 article by Örjan in Science.

• The Environmental Performance of Participatory and Collaborative Governance: A Framework of Causal Mechanisms - 2018 article by Newig et al.