The Shadow Side of Collaboration

What happens when the strengths that make networks thrive also make them fragile and vulnerable — and what to do about it.

A field note for collaborators working in social impact, sustainability, and systems change.

Author’s Note

This essay extends ideas from The Networks We Need vs. the Institutions We Have.

It recognizes the many people and coalitions already strengthening their networks with care and courage.

These reflections aren’t critiques of that progress but reminders of its fragility: the same forces that make networks powerful — trust, alignment, shared purpose — can, under pressure, distort or drift.

The aim is quiet vigilance: even our best systems require maintenance to stay true to purpose.

Where the Idea Began

This idea began with a phrase used by Leah Greenberg, Co-Executive Director of Indivisible: strategic noncooperation.¹

The term comes from the lineage of nonviolent resistance — from Gandhi’s Satyagraha to Gene Sharp’s 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action — but it’s not simply about protest or withdrawal.² Strategic noncooperation means deliberately withholding cooperation from systems that depend on our participation to legitimize them.

It gives language to that instinct we all know — that gut sense when a meeting or partnership stops feeling productive and starts feeling performative.

At its best, it’s a design choice, not a tantrum: a way to rebalance power in systems that reward obedience disguised as collaboration. It’s how networks defend their autonomy when the structures around them have been captured or corrupted.

Strategic noncooperation is what happens when people inside a system decide, quietly or collectively, that participation no longer equals progress. It’s the moment a network recognizes that connection itself can be compromised.

From a Connecting for Change perspective, the phrase opened a wider question:

What happens when the same tools that make collaboration possible — trust, narrative, alignment — start to drift, intentionally or not, from connection toward control?

Most systems aren’t captured by conspiracy; they drift there by design — through habit, inertia, and misplaced reward.

Across climate, water, philanthropy, and civic life, the same pattern appears: collaboration becomes doctrine, institutions harden, and the networks that were meant to carry change end up defending the very systems they were built to transform.

Network resistance is the antidote. It’s not about tearing structures down, but about teaching systems to feel again — to notice when integrity slips, to withdraw when participation feeds harm, and to return when trust has been repaired.³

Collaboration’s Double Edge

We talk about collaboration as if it’s always virtuous — the universal solvent for complexity. Every summit, partnership, and coalition promises “alignment.” But the more we worship collaboration, the more easily it turns into performance.

In practice, collaboration often rewards visibility over value. Institutions under pressure use it to prove goodwill while preserving hierarchy. The more fragile the legitimacy of a system, the louder its calls for unity.

At global climate summits, panels on “inclusive partnership” rarely include frontline actors. At COP28, Indigenous and frontline organizations again argued that participation was too often symbolic — presence without shared power.¹¹ Their critique echoed a pattern seen across many convenings: inclusion as optics rather than authorship.

In philanthropy, collective-impact frameworks promise alignment but quietly centralize control. Even the designers of collective-impact frameworks have since acknowledged this risk, emphasizing the need to “center equity and governance” to prevent coordination from becoming control.¹²

In the water sector, multilateral convenings produce declarations that sound unified but leave governance unchanged.⁴

These are what collaboration looks like when it becomes theater — visible, well-intentioned, and strangely hollow.

Collaboration isn’t neutral; it’s a technology of power. Used well, it distributes it. Used poorly, it domesticates dissent.

Collaboration without structural reform is soft authoritarianism — control disguised as consensus.

The Playbook of Network Capture

Every captured system follows a familiar playbook:

Amplification — flood signal channels until attention fragments.

In politics, this looks like deliberate disinformation; in the nonprofit and sustainability worlds, it’s more subtle — an arms race of announcements, events, and reports that chase visibility faster than coherence.

The result is the same: attention atomized, insight drowned in good intentions.

This dynamic is amplified by the attention economy itself — where emotional content outperforms measured insight, and organizational incentives increasingly favor visibility over coherence.¹³

Gatekeeping — replace neutral brokers with loyal ones.

In government, it’s the purge of civil servants in favor of partisans. In the civic and environmental worlds, it’s subtler — the familiar tendency to circulate contracts, invitations, and speaking slots among the same trusted circle.

Fed by the “move fast and break things” ethos — or its mission-driven cousin, the “urgency of opportunity” — organizations reach first for partners who already speak their language. It feels efficient, even virtuous: if you want to move fast, go with the familiar.

But over time, that habit trades diversity for speed, and collective intelligence for comfort. Upstarts stay unknown, new actors stay unfunded, and the ecosystem mistakes familiarity for credibility.

The same logic shows up in large-scale initiatives that recycle the same “trusted” partners — a form of philanthropic gatekeeping that favors familiarity over discovery.¹⁴

Feedback collapse — weaken the bridges that carry dissent or correction.

Sometimes that collapse is intentional — suppressing critique or independent oversight. But more often it’s cultural: evaluation becomes perfunctory, learning loops get outsourced, and emotional fatigue replaces honest reflection.

Driven again by the urgency of mission — the conviction that pausing equals falling behind — organizations rush past discomfort in the name of progress. Reflection starts to look like delay; pause, like weakness.

Yet when dissent is treated as disloyalty, or when urgency eclipses curiosity, systems stop sensing their own mistakes.

The result is a system that still looks alive — messages still move, meetings still happen — but the feedback loops no longer work.

Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) face similar patterns. A decade-long review found that while MSIs excel at dialogue, they rarely ensure accountability or remedy — feedback without consequence.¹⁵

Control today doesn’t start with tanks or censorship. It begins with the quiet rewiring of networks — who talks to whom, whose voices are amplified, whose are throttled.⁵

You can see it across domains:

In Brazil, coordinated WhatsApp networks between 2018 and 2022 turned encrypted group chats into disinformation supply chains, spreading emotionally charged content faster than fact-checking could catch up.¹⁶

In Hungary, the slow consolidation of media ownership under government-aligned foundations re-engineered gatekeeping itself, concentrating legitimacy in a single network.¹⁷

In India, polarization around religion and nationalism illustrates how moralized emotions — not ideas — have become the organizing logic of digital publics.¹⁸

In the water and climate sector, philanthropic and multilateral funding networks sometimes mirror the same architecture of capture: a handful of large brokers define agendas while smaller, place-based innovators orbit as implementers, not authors. Over time, the signal weakens — innovation turns into replication, and alignment substitutes for accountability.¹⁹

Even in social-impact coalitions, “multi-stakeholder engagement” can drift into managed consent: convenings that absorb critique rather than act on it. A ten-year review of environmental governance partnerships found similar tendencies: stakeholder consultation often substitutes for decision-making power, producing “feedback theater” rather than reform.²⁰

As I wrote in The Networks We Need vs. the Institutions We Have, the same energy that drives us to connect and communicate can also fragment the very systems we’re trying to strengthen.

Because the social-impact and sustainability worlds mirror these same architectures — centralized funding, curated consensus, emotional contagion — they’re not immune.

Network capture isn’t just political; it’s ecological. Every system tends toward self-protection. The danger lies in forgetting that protection and progress are not the same thing.

Strategic Noncooperation = Network Immunity

In biological systems, immunity isn’t hostility; it’s discernment — the capacity to tell what belongs and what doesn’t. Strategic noncooperation is that discernment made civic.

It’s the decision to stop feeding captured systems — to withdraw legitimacy from processes that reward performance over integrity.

This isn’t apathy; it’s agency — an immune response against capture.⁷

As Adam Kahane reminds us in Collaborating with the Enemy, collaboration is only one of four ways to respond to a broken situation — alongside forcing, adapting, and exiting.²²

We forget that we have this range. When collaboration becomes compulsory, it stops being choice and starts being capture.

Strategic noncooperation lives in that space: the healthy no that keeps the larger network from losing integrity.

In practice, strategic noncooperation rarely looks dramatic. It can be a coalition declining another round of stakeholder engagement until transparency improves.

A research partnership refusing to whitewash results for a sponsor.

An NGO stepping back from a donor whose conditions erase autonomy.

Decline the panel, pause the MOU, return the grant. Refusal, in these cases, is not sabotage. It’s repair.⁸

You can see this logic in the 2020 #StopHateForProfit campaign, when civil-society groups coordinated a month-long advertising boycott against Facebook to protest its handling of hate speech.

Financially, the impact was modest; reputationally, it was transformative — participation reframed as leverage. The boycott barely dented Facebook’s quarterly revenue but reshaped the reputational landscape, proving that legitimacy — not dollars — is the true currency of cooperation.²¹

Every living system survives by learning when to say no.¹⁰

Words as Infrastructure

Every network runs on invisible assets — trust, story, and vocabulary.

Language is not decoration; it’s infrastructure. The moment we stop maintaining it, meaning begins to corrode.

Control doesn’t begin with silence. It begins with noise.

Flood the discourse with emotion and the feedback loops that once carried understanding start to distort. In that sense, propaganda isn’t a message — it’s an environment.

Over time, emotional overload rewires the network. MIT’s Laboratory for Social Machines found that false news spreads six times faster than true news, precisely because it triggers anger and surprise.¹¹ Pew’s longitudinal analysis shows the same pattern — a rise in anger-related language and a decline in words signaling curiosity or empathy.¹²

Shift the tone, and you shift the topology.

When networks are saturated with anger, bridges collapse; clusters harden; empathy erodes.

We’ve seen this pattern across scales — from “fake news” morphing from critique to cudgel, to “net zero” turning from ambition to accounting trick. The 2023 Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor found that 85% of corporate “net-zero” pledges lacked integrity or relied heavily on offset accounting — proof that even climate ambition can drift toward semantics.²²

When language stretches to include everything, it stops meaning anything.

When we stop defining words for ourselves, we start living inside someone else’s definition.

In organizational life, this kind of linguistic drift often feels harmless — another “alignment workshop,” another buzzword cycle. But every word carries architecture.

As we wrote in Glossy Words, Murky Outcomes, water stewardship has become fluent in a handful of glossy terms — collaboration, acceleration, innovation, collective action. They sound visionary and strategic, but too often they become language-as-signal rather than language-as-strategy. They flatten nuance, privilege fluency over substance, and create an illusion of alignment that masks exclusion.¹³

As the field conversation accelerates, the gap between performative fluency and grounded practice widens — language becomes a currency, and credibility a brand.²³

“Collaboration” promises shared decision-making but often delivers consultation without influence. “Acceleration” sounds urgent but rewards motion over progress. “Innovation” celebrates novelty even when older, land-based wisdom holds deeper answers. And “collective action,” invoked without shared measurement or accountability, becomes performance — a networking event disguised as change.¹⁴

When words overpromise, they erode trust. Communities and partners start to feel like props in someone else’s impact narrative.

Each iteration without accountability dilutes trust a little more, until only ritual remains.

That’s how capture feels from the inside — fluent, familiar, and hollow.

The sociologist Teun van Dijk called this semantic manipulation — the slow bending of public meaning through repetition.¹⁵

In digital ecosystems, that bending is automated: algorithms privilege engagement over nuance, outrage over context.¹⁶

What starts as emotional contagion becomes structural bias — a feedback economy that rewards polarization.¹⁷

The remedy isn’t to abandon shared language but to reclaim authorship of it.

Every healthy network needs its own semantic commons — spaces where meaning is negotiated rather than prescribed.

Editing a mission statement, revising a definition, or refusing a buzzword is itself a civic act.

It’s how linguistic immunity works: continual renewal of the words that hold our relationships together.

Because if networks are the body, language is the connective tissue.

Let it scar over too many times, and even the strongest systems lose their ability to feel.

A Call for Network Literacy

If authoritarianism thrives by exploiting networks, and collaboration drifts toward capture — sometimes by design, sometimes by neglect — then renewal in politics, climate action, and philanthropy depends on network literacy: the ability to see who connects, who extracts, and where trust actually flows.

Network literacy isn’t a technical skill. It’s a civic sense — part systems thinking, part emotional intelligence. It’s the practice of seeing not only structures but the stories that bind them.

For those working in social impact, sustainability, or systems change, it begins with a few deceptively simple disciplines:

Map the network, not just the plan.

Most strategies chart intentions, not relationships. Network mapping reveals who actually holds influence, which voices broker information, and where feedback loops are broken.²⁶ Social network analyses in multi-sector coalitions consistently reveal that less-visible connectors — mid-tier practitioners and local organizers — often hold the greatest bridging power.²⁴

A good map doesn’t show control; it shows dependency. Once you can see where coordination or communication bottlenecks exist, you can start repairing trust — or deciding where to withhold it.

Audit your language.

Every system has a lexicon, and every lexicon encodes power. Which words in your organization build shared agency — and which mask control?

Linguistic drift is one of the earliest signs of capture.²⁷ Practice translating your own jargon back into plain speech until you can explain it to someone outside your network without euphemism or defensiveness.

Practice strategic noncooperation.

Participation is not always progress. Learn to recognize when engagement feeds legitimacy rather than learning. Stepping back from collaborations that erode autonomy is not abandonment; it’s maintenance. Sometimes a quiet no is the loudest signal a system can send.

Reward integrity over alignment.

Systems that survive are those that can tolerate disagreement. Rewarding candor, dissent, and revision is what keeps collaboration adaptive.

In biology, homeostasis depends on negative feedback; in networks, it depends on psychological safety — the permission to be out of sync.²⁸

Network literacy is the new civic literacy.

It’s what allows us to distinguish between a system that is merely connected and one that is genuinely alive.

For practitioners in the social-impact and sustainability worlds, this means building teams and partnerships that can metabolize disagreement instead of suppressing it — what resilience theorist Brian Walker calls adaptive capacity.²⁹ Because the more complex our challenges become, the more dangerous it is to confuse unity with health.

Healthy systems depend as much on selective withdrawal as on constant connection — the small pauses and boundaries that keep them from burning out.

The immune system is not antisocial; it’s what allows the body to keep living.

Closing Reflection

I keep thinking about that in every meeting where everyone agrees too quickly, and the air feels heavy with unspoken doubt. Every network I’ve worked in has its story of capture — the conversation that went flat, the partnership that stopped listening, the language that lost its edge. But every network also carries its own medicine — the capacity to notice, to pause, to refuse.

When connection becomes performance, the most radical act is to feel again.

That’s what strategic noncooperation really is: a system remembering its own sensitivity.

Because authoritarians, institutions, and algorithms all study networks. They learn how to manipulate trust, redirect attention, and feed on emotion.

In 2024, the Vital Voices Anti-Authoritarian Network Study documented how civil-society groups counter this pattern by cultivating cross-movement trust — an intentional antidote to capture.²⁵

As Zeynep Tufekci observed, authoritarian control relies not on censorship but on noise.²¹

The challenge for us is learning to hear again — to listen through the static for what still signals truth.

The integrity of every movement, partnership, or democracy depends not only on how well we collaborate, but on our willingness to step back when connection turns into capture.

Collaboration, at its best, is not compliance — it’s care.

It’s the ongoing work of tending the spaces between us: the trust, the tension, the language, the breath.

Refusal is maintenance.

Discernment is defense.

And collaboration begins again the moment we remember what it’s for.

For all these risks, it’s worth remembering: every system also carries within it the seeds of renewal. Across the field, countless people are doing the opposite of capture — widening the circle, sharing credit, and creating space for dissent.

The immune system isn’t just defensive; it’s creative.

Eternal vigilance doesn’t mean suspicion — it means care.

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Endnotes

1. Leah Greenberg, Indivisible interview, 2025.

2. Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Porter Sargent, 1973.

3. Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 1, 1787; Indivisible Project, “No Kings Movement,” 2024.

4. UN Water Conference 2023 outcomes; FSG Collective Impact framework, 2011.

5. Protect Democracy, The Authoritarian Playbook, 2024.

6. Resende et al., “(Mis)Information Dissemination in WhatsApp Groups During Brazil’s Elections,” Harvard Misinformation Review, 2021.

7. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

8. #StopHateForProfit campaign materials, Anti-Defamation League Archive, 2020.

9. Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems, Chelsea Green, 2008.

10. Adam Kahane, Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust, 2nd ed., Berrett-Koehler Publishers (forthcoming 2025); “Dealing with Difficult Situations,” presentation slides, 2025.

11. Indigenous Environmental Network, “COP28: False Solutions and Tokenized Inclusion,” press statement, December 2023; The Guardian, “Indigenous Voices Say COP28 Failed on Inclusion,” 2023.

12. Paul Schmitz & Junious Williams, “Centering Equity in Collective Impact,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2020.

13. Pew Research Center, Rising Tone of Anger and Fatigue in U.S. Political Discourse on Social Media, 2023; MIT Media Lab, Laboratory for Social Machines: The Spread of False News Online, 2018.

14. Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation (GPEDC), Making Development Co-operation More Effective, 2022.

15. MSI Integrity, Not Fit-for-Purpose: The Grand Experiment of Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives in Corporate Accountability, Human Rights, and Global Governance, 2020.

16. Resende et al., ibid.

17. Bátorfy & Urbán, “State-Related Ownership and Control in the Hungarian Media,” Mediapolis, 2020.

18. Rao et al., “Religious Polarization and Networked Nationalism in India,” Social Media + Society, 2023.

19. GPEDC, ibid.

20. Independent Evaluation Group (World Bank), Stakeholder Engagement in Environmental Governance: Findings and Lessons, 2023.

21. Axios, “Facebook’s Boycott Cost Was Small, But the Reputational Damage Was Real,” July 2020.

22. NewClimate Institute & Carbon Market Watch, Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor 2023, February 2023.

23. Schuler, George & Whateley, Sarah, Glossy Words, Murky Outcomes: How Water Stewardship Got Stuck in Its Own Language, Connecting for Change, 2025.

24. Valdis Krebs, Network Mapping for Strategy and Change, OrgNet, 2020; Schuler & Whateley, Connecting for Change Network Visibility Framework, 2025.

25. Vital Voices, Anti-Authoritarian Network Study, 2024.

26. Teun A. van Dijk, “Discourse and Manipulation,” Discourse & Society, Vol. 17, No. 3, 2006.

27. Brady, Wills, Jost et al., “Emotion Shapes the Diffusion of Moralized Content in Social Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Vol. 114, 2017.

28. Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, Penguin Press, 2011.

29. Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization, Wiley, 2019.

30. Brian Walker & David Salt, Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World, Island Press, 2006.

31. Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Yale University Press, 2017.

32. Author’s synthesis of sources cited above; original reflections from The Networks We Need vs. The Institutions We Have, Connecting for Change, 2024.