Citizen participation and empowerment are critical sustainability elements. One increasingly popular form of citizen participation is collaborative-environmental management (CEM). This approach has been described as a new way of governing for environmental issues, an alternative to government-centered processes, that empowers stakeholders and citizens to play a dominant role in planning and decision making. This paper describes a new analytical framework, called the Governmental Impact Framework, for understanding how government affects CEM and the sustainability of outcomes. This framework incorporates institutional analysis to illuminate government-stakeholder relationships and the interplay of biophysical and social factors. Applying the framework to a collaborative land-use planning case in the American state of Ohio indicates that governments are more dominant in collaborative processes than previously thought, and that the channels of influence vary along several dimensions.