Coastal climate impacts have evolved so that the solutions that infrastructure managers have historically used to adapt to flooding may no longer be sufficient. Consequently, many have begun to consider alternatives to conventional grey infrastructure, including nature-based coastal adaptation (NBCA) projects. Collaboration has been suggested as a way of drawing on multiple perspectives, skillsets, and knowledge bases that can address implementation challenges. To examine the ability of collaboration to advance NBCA projects, I conducted a case study of the Boundary Bay Living Dike (BBLD), one of the first NBCA projects in the Canadian province of British Columbia. The most significant hindering factors were institutional (such as jurisdiction and mandate, assumptions and paradigm, and regulations) and systemic (influenced by conditions such as the Covid-19 pandemic and high inflation). These findings contribute conceptually to the barriers to adaptation literature, and practically to both those looking to implement NBCA and those with the ability to develop systems to enable them.