Collaboration is increasingly seen as a preferred way of delivering complex projects involving multiple partners, suppliers and customers (Acha et al., 2004; Davies and Hobday, 2005). Collaborative competence amongst partnering firms is a necessity to successfully manage large-scale, multi-organisation projects (Davies, 2004). Collaboration is defined in this paper as “the commitment to working together with two or more parties to create value by striving to achieve shared competitive goals and operational benefits through a spirit of mutual trust and openness” (Institute for Collaborative Working, 2016). Collaboration can be challenging in temporary, project-based settings, especially when the involved organisations lack prior experience of working together: “one of the biggest risks to large-scale infrastructure projects is conflict emerging between consortium partners who have not co-operated before” (The Financial Times, 2016). Collaborative culture, norms and practices take time to develop; this implies challenges in the context of time-limited projects (DeFillippi and Sydow, 2016; Jones et al., 1997). Accordingly, collaboration in complex projects is often considered particularly challenging, and needs to be governed effectively. As an example of the emerging need to govern collaboration in complex projects, consider the ongoing UK High Speed 2 (HS2) project for building a fast railway initially linking London with Birmingham, and later with Leeds and Manchester. To this date, the HS2 project organisation has spent close to £۱ million to formally test the collaborative behaviour and abilities of bidding alliances (The Financial Times, 2016). More broadly, project alliances and their members aim for competitive advantage on the basis of their abilities to collaborate, which can in turn enable improved governance in specific projects (Vangen et al., 2015). Project governance refers to the governance of individual projects. It comprises a consistent method of controlling the project and enacting sets of practices that are reliable and repeatable across projects (Mülleret al., 2014), one of which is collaborative practices. This suggests that whilst successful delivery of complex projects requires flexibility to respond to unique customer requirements (Davies and Hobday, 2005), the governance structures of complex projects can be replicated across multiple projects yielding possibilities for efficiency in subsequent ventures (Brady and Davies, 2004; Müller et al., 2014).