Mittuniversitetet

Collaboration plays a vital role in addressing complex problems across multiple domains of life – whether in private households, professional environments, or broader societal contexts. At a societal level, collaboration is often necessary to solve critical and complex tasks invarious contexts, across which it is fundamentally relational. In otherwords, collaboration does not occur in a vacuum but rather is conditioned by temporal and spatial conditions and social relations, which together influence how it takes form and unfolds. Despite the importance of these contextual aspects, research on collaboration within civil society has often paid limited analytical attention to how temporality, spatiality and social relations shape collaborative practices. This thesis seeks to address this gap by exploring collaboration among civil society actors through a relational lens, witha particular focus on the dynamics in the setting of refugee support and forest fires at the local level. It consists of four individual papers (Papers I–IV), each of which applies a relational perspective to examine how social relations, temporality and spatiality interact to influence the formation, development and sustainability of collaboration within  civil society. The first paper lays the foundation by exploring how locally based civil society organisations (CSOs) in Malmö responded to the refugee situation of 2015–2016. Using interviews with CSOs and combining a framework for organisational drivers of collaboration with relational sociology, it shows that collaboration is not only activated by external needs but is also deeply conditioned by preexisting relations. It highlights how collaboration functions both as a response to crisis and as a trust-building process that sustains organisational resilience. This paper establishes the importance of relational interdependencies in urban contexts and introduces temporality as a key dimension, especially as CSOs anticipate future scenarios in shaping their current actions. Building on this, Paper II examines a more formalised platform for collaboration – theMalmöandan local compact – through the lens of a collaborative governance framework. In addition to interviews, it includes policy documents related to the Malmöandan, making temporality more explicitly central, as the paper investigates how CSOs’ engagement with the compact is shaped by their perceptions of future roles and risks. The study reveals that while some CSOs see the Malmöandan as a pathway to deeper collaboration with local government, others perceive it as a potential threat to their autonomy, shaped by political ideologies and historical mistrust. Thus, this paper extends the temporal analysis of Paper I by showing how anticipated futures and ideological conditions shape collaborative willingness and withdrawal. The third paper shifts the empirical focus from an urban to a rural setting, exploring how informants in the northern inland area of Sweden discuss collaboration concerning refugee support. Using relational place theory and the concept of peripheralisation, it introduces the notion of place-specific collaboration to describe how rural civil society actors adapt to their unique challenges. While expanding the spatial scope of the thesis, this paper also reinforces the relational insights of Papers I and II by demonstrating how spatial configurations enable and constrain interactions and resource sharing across actors. Finally, the fourth paper integrates and extends the thesis’s analytical frame by focusing on volunteers and their experiences of voluntary action from a processual temporal perspective. Drawing on the notion of agency as temporally embedded, and informed by additional empirical material consisting of interviews from the 2018 forest fires in Gävleborg and Jämtland, this paper shows how volunteers navigate between past experiences, present conditions, and imagined futures. In doing so, it offers a more processual understanding of volunteerism that complements the other papers and underscores how temporal narratives are not only interpretive tools but also drivers of agency and collaboration. Overall, this thesis demonstrates that collaboration within civil society is relational and shaped by temporality and spatiality. Voluntary initiatives and collaborative practices are conditioned through interactions with other actors and events across time and space. Theoretically, by integrating insights from relational sociology, the thesis offers a dynamic understanding of how relationships emerge, evolve and influence collective action. Empirically, it contributes to research by examining both urban and rural settings and by including both formal organisations and individuals engaged in voluntary action outside organisational frameworks. Based on qualitative data, the findings underscore the interdependencies and contextual conditions that condition and shape how collaboration unfolds in practice.

Samarbete är avgörande för att hantera komplexa samhällsutmaningar, men påverkas alltid av tidsmässiga, rumsliga och relationella villkor. Trots detta beaktar forskningen om civilsamhället ofta i begränsad utsträckning hur dessa faktorer präglar praktiken. Denna avhandling undersöker samarbete mellan civilsamhällets aktörer ur ett relationellt perspektiv med särskilt fokus på lokala sammanhang. Avhandlingens syfte är övergripande att synliggöra hur sociala relationer samspelar med tid och rum för att forma både förutsättningar och dynamik i samarbetsprocesser. Genom att förena dessa perspektiv visar avhandlingen hur samarbeten etableras, utvecklas och förändras över tid och plats. Sammantaget erbjuder avhandlingen en fördjupad förståelse av civilsamhällets kollektiva handlande som kontextbundet och relationellt förankrat. Denna insikt är central för att bättre kunna analysera samarbete i såväl vardagliga situationer som i kriser och framtida samhällsutmaningar.