Relationships and Collaboration among Associations

The collaboration among voluntary associations (VAs), as well as among nonprofit agencies (NPAs), with different external organizations as actors is part of our social and institutional landscape (Smith 2015a, 2015b). This phenomenon is not new, but what has changed in recent decades is the growing presence of such collaboration all over the world. This chapter focuses on collaboration especially between and among larger paid-staff VAs, often national and other supra-local associations (see Handbook Chapter 33) and also by NPAs. There is little or no attention to collaboration involving smaller, local associations, especially to the vast majority of VAs that are all-volunteer grassroots associations (GAs; see Handbook Chapter 32). This approach results partly from the relative lack of research on collaboration at the level of GAs, but also from the specialized expertise of the authors.