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The article combines the concepts of communicative space and purposeful institutional design through an action research approach to facilitate an interactive and collective engagement of multiple actors towards crafting innovative institutions that contribute in fostering co-management alternatives. It describes the three cycle process leading to the creation of the communicative space and analyses the engagement enacted by the community members and Limpopo National Park staff in an experiential collaborative process of improving the 20% benefit sharing mechanism. Through such analysis, the article seeks to understand events and factors that influenced enabling moments of actions. It also assesses how these collective actions influenced the group agency and how the institutions were crafted, reshaped or changed to accommodate the changes being sought towards a functional 20% benefiting sharing mechanism. Findings highlight actors’ relationships and trust as crucial in enabling concerted actions, while capacity building enhanced their confidence in developing these concerted actions. The iterative process of learning from performed actions at different levels, combined with continuous capacity building contributed to activating the community members’ agency to collaboratively craft appropriate institutions to pursue their needs, rights and an active committee for natural resources management. It also created awareness in park staff of their own praxis and their recognition of the need to embrace collaborative management practices. Nonetheless, institutionalisation of co-management at Limpopo National Park remains beyond the goodwill of the community and the park.