Shifting Grounds of Collaboration in Changing Contexts: Evolving Environmental Networks in the Basque Country

Interorganizational collaboration is crucial for collective action and political activism, particularly in environmental advocacy. Social network analysis tools are increasingly used to study collaboration among civic and political actors outside traditional institutions. While the literature has examined multiple factors influencing collaboration, less attention has been paid to how their predictive power evolves over time in response to contextual political shifts. This article aims to fill this gap by exploring the impact of rapid political changes on collaborative relationships in collective action. Using data on interorganizational collaboration within the environmental collective action field in the Basque Country (Spain) between 2007 and 2017, we analyze how large-scale transformative events and cycles of contention moderate the influence of various predictors of collaborative ties. More specifically, we use statistical network analyses to examine the relative impact of seven determinants of event co-attendance across six yearly observations. Our findings indicate that during the last years of violent conflict, shared identification with Basque nationalism facilitated collaboration, while disagreements over ETA’s armed struggle hindered it. However, in the post-conflict phase, ideological factors lost relevance, suggesting a shift from a model of “militant confrontation” to one of “pragmatic cooperation.” Nonetheless, pragmatic considerations did not completely replace ideological commitments as the main drivers of collaboration. Instead of a straightforward shift, this transition is characterized by the blurring of previous boundaries, not by the establishment of clearly defined new structuring factors. As a result, the collaboration network has become more pluralistic but also less predictable.