The Supply of Collaboration Assets During co-Response to Overlapping and Concurrent Community Problems

Communities increasingly face complex problems that demand coordinated public responses. While collaboration has been an operational mainstay of local governments for several decades, attention to how communities approach and manage multiple demands from the same set of resources has been underexamined. This study examines ten communities navigating the opioid crisis and the onset of COVID-19 in early 2020. Using two waves of survey data, we assess the evolution of collaborative capacity and explore how pandemic response efforts interacted with existing opioid initiatives. Findings reveal that communities mobilized existing collaborative assets without degrading prior efforts. Notably, these assets were predominantly intangible—such as trust, norms, and shared understanding—rather than material resources. This distinction is critical for understanding resilience in public systems. We apply a common pool resource framing to conceptualize the supply and deployment of collaborative assets across concurrent challenges, offering insights into sustaining effective governance under pressure.