From The Intersector Project’s “Research to Practice” series, this article looks closely at scholarly research and highlights key facts, actionable takeaways, and additional resources practitioners can turn to for related guidance.

Much research on cross-sector collaboration captures only a snapshot of a partnership’s work, but collaborations often last for several years or are ongoing. Examining a partnership over time holds potentially valuable lessons, because of the rich source material that comes from several years of collaborating across sectors. In “Investigating Collaborative Processes Over Time: A 10-Year Study of the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force,” published in The American Review of Public Administration, Andrea Gerlak of the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona and Tanya Heikilla of the University of Colorado Denver study a decade of collaborative work by the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force, which guides preservation and restoration efforts of the Florida Everglades.