More and better collaboration between farmers and other stakeholders has repeatedly been identified as a key strategy for sustainable agriculture. However, for collaboration to actually benefit sustainable agriculture certain conditions have to be met. In this paper, we scrutinize the conditions that support or hamper the success of collaborative efforts in the context of sustainable agriculture. For this purpose, we conducted an exploratory case study meta-analysis to consolidate insights from 30 case studies on local and regional collaborative groups for a more sustainable agriculture in the EU. Through multiple regression analysis, we evaluated which factors influence the ‘success’ of such collaboratives. Thereby, we measured success through five explicit and comprehensive success criteria. We found two external, five actor-related, and five organization and management-related factors to decisively influence the different success criteria. Overall, our results highlight that collaboration success requires defining priorities as for each of the success criteria a different set of factors is decisive. Although our results showed trade-offs between the achievement of social and economic goals, it is possible to pursue some success criteria simultaneously. Furthermore, our results give reason to be optimistic about the performance of collaboratives: internal factors, which are in the hand of the collaboratives, are likely to be of greater importance than uncontrollable external conditions. Additionally, conditions encountered at the outset of a collaborative matter less than the way these conditions develop toward later stages. Thus, rather than depending on external and predefined conditions, success largely depends on the agency within the collaboratives.

农民与其他利益相关者之间越来越多的更好的合作已被反复确认为可持续农业的关键战略。但是，为了使合作真正使可持续农业受益，必须满足某些条件。在本文中，我们仔细研究了在可持续农业背景下支持或阻碍合作努力成功的条件。为此，我们进行了探索性案例研究荟萃分析，以巩固来自30个案例研究的见解，这些案例研究涉及地方和区域合作团体，旨在促进欧盟的可持续农业发展。通过多元回归分析，我们评估了哪些因素会影响此类协作的“成功”。因此，我们通过五个明确而全面的成功标准来衡量成功。我们发现两个外部的，五个与演员相关的，五个与组织和管理相关的因素将决定性地影响不同的成功标准。总体而言，我们的结果强调，协作成功需要定义优先级，因为对于每个成功标准，一组不同的因素都是决定性的。尽管我们的结果显示了在实现社会和经济目标之间的取舍，但是有可能同时追求一些成功标准。此外，我们的结果使我们对合作社的表现持乐观态度：内部因素（比起不可控制的外部条件更重要）是由合作者掌握的。此外，在协作事务开始时遇到的条件要少于这些条件向后期发展的方式。从而，