| Inter-entity collaboration has proliferated over the past two decades in many forms. Tremendous complexity inheres in such collaborations. They reflect increasingly global issues and concerns. What makes such collaborations possible, gives them life, meaning, and helps them thrive in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles?; Interfaith movements represent one of the greatest challenges to collaboration, given the millennia-old entrenchment in violent religious conflict. The United Religions Initiative (URI), a global, chaordic, interfaith alliance dedicated to ending religiously motivated violence, is chosen as the research setting for that reason.; Collaborative Capacity (CC) is introduced as an integrative theoretical framework. The ten constructs of the CC Framework, developed through an extensive trans-disciplinary review of the inter-entity collaboration literature, are proposed as being generic to such collaborations and applicable at multiple levels of analysis. The CC Framework is then explored and applied at multiple levels of analysis through a virtual appreciative inquiry process in this multiple case-study involving eight URI “cooperation circles” on four continents, chosen to maximize their diversity on the ten CC constructs.; Qualitative and quantitative analyses provide strong, consistent evidence for a basic distinction among the eight cases: those that are more informally structured and internally focused, and those that are more formally structured and externally focused. This spectrum of diverse forms, ranging from informal virtual groups to formal national non-profits, is made possible through the URIs innovative chaordic design. That design provides an effective—though challenging—structure for global, grassroots interfaith organizing, at least among these eight cases. Overall, the inner/outer foci among the cases reflect the greater inner focus of the URI principles and the greater outer focus of its action agenda. Those foci seem to express the URIs own complex challenge of building collaboration.; What gives life and meaning to these diverse URI collaborations? Through application of the CC Framework, three key factors emerge: purpose, principles, and relationships—and all three center around relationships. Within the URI and possibly beyond, Collaborative Capacity is about that most fundamental of human social concerns: being respectfully, caringly, and deeply related. Perhaps it is ultimately about developing the relational organization. |
