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The increasing scale and interconnection of many environmental challenges - from climate change to land use - has resulted in the need to collaborate across borders and boundaries of all types. Traditional centralized, top-down and sectoral approaches to governance of single-issue areas or species within social-ecological systems often have limited potential to alleviate issues that go beyond their jurisdiction. As a result, collaborative governance approaches have come to the forefront. A great deal of past research has examined the conditions under which collaborative efforts are likely to achieve desired outcomes. However, few studies have analyzed how the means to achieve successful collaborative outcomes differ based on context when examined across multiple studies. In this research, we begin to chart a means for doing this. Building onto a Context-Mechanism-Outcome (CMO) Framework, we provide a coding manual to analyse how contextual variables mediate the effects of mechanism variables on outcomes of the collaborative governance of social-ecological systems. Through the examination of four cases, we provide a proof-of-concept assessment and show the utility of the CMO framework and coding manual to draw comparisons across cases for understanding how collaborative outcomes are contingent on the social-ecological context in which they occur.

Available empirical evidence about the impacts of large-scale agricultural investments (LAIs) in low-income countries is skewed towards the assessment of economic benefits. How LAIs affect land use and the environment is less understood. This study assesses how small-scale farmers living close to an LAI perceive the changes LAI's inflict on land use, land management, and tree cover in Kenya, Mozambique, and Madagascar. It also investigates their perceptions regarding LAI's impacts on the general environment and people's health, as well as on employment opportunities, infrastructure, and conflicts. 271 small-scale farmers were interviewed and their perceptions supported by a remote-sensing-based analysis of land use and land cover changes. Results show that LAIs contributed both directly and indirectly to deforestation in Mozambique, triggered changes in small-scale farmers’ agricultural land management in Kenya, and caused pastoralists to lose access to grazing land in Madagascar. Despite some benefits from employment opportunities and infrastructure improvement, the majority of respondents perceived the overall impacts of LAIs as negative, highlighting reduced access to land and water, pollution, health issues, and unsatisfactory working conditions. We urgently need to invest in devising concrete transformative options to improve LAIs’ contribution to sustainable development in their host countries.