Coastal areas are some of the most vulnerable locations for people and ecosystems in a changing climate. In response to competing priorities, nature-based coastal adaptation projects are becoming more common despite facing many barriers to implementation. The aim of this paper is to examine whether, and in what ways, collaboration can enable the design and implementation of nature-based coastal adaptation projects. To do this, we used an action-based framework of roles to examine the collaboration supporting the Boundary Bay Living Dike, a pilot project in British Columbia, Canada. Through 32 semi-structured interviews, we analyzed the frequency and co-occurrence of 17 different roles (ten from an existing framework and three identified in our data) actors played in the Boundary Bay Living Dike, identified the most significant barriers to the project, and examined how the collaboration between actors addressed those barriers. We found that collaboration created several opportunities that benefitted the project.