Understanding how political actors engage in collaborative behavior in fragmented policy arenas is extremely important, particularly when the use of finite public goods is at stake (Feiock and Scholz). Collaboration may reduce the potential occurrence of conflict among users by informing parties about better ways to avoid negative externalities and to take advantage of positive ones, creating the conditions under which more extensive cooperative behavior can develop. Given the important effects that collaborative initiatives may produce, it is only logical that the bulk of research in political science and public administration concentrates on studying how to overcome the initial obstacles to collaboration in the presence of excessive fragmentation.

However, less attention is paid to answering the question of how collaboration can be sustained over time. This is unfortunate, since the continuation of these practices, rather than their mere emergence, is what makes the solutions to institutional collective action (ICA) problems more valuable to stakeholders. Fortunately, important progress has recently been made by scholars in both political science and public administration on how collaboration can be achieved and extended (cf. Feiock 2004, 2007; Koontz et al. 2004; Sabatier et al. 2005; Scholz and Stiftel 2005). This research continues this trend by explaining how collaboration can be sustained when actors exchange resources that are needed for the successful implementation of joint ventures, one of the self-organizing mechanisms to solve ICA problems that are explored in this book.