The management of shared natural resources often hinges on local cooperation, yet the social networks linking communities across space can both complicate and enable collective action. This talk examines how long-distance friendships—relationships that bridge community boundaries—shape trust, cooperation, and participation in fisheries management in coastal Tanzania. Drawing on theoretical models and multi-site ethnographic and survey data from the Tanga Sociality and Fisheries Project, I show that long-distance friendships provide key forms of material support similar to local friendships, suggesting they are a resilient social strategy for managing ecological and economic risk while fostering interdependence across villages. In turn, people with more long-distance friends express greater trust in non-local partners and are more likely to engage in collective monitoring and reporting of destructive fishing practices. Finally, I introduce a new measure, “long-distance orientation,” capturing individual variation in the motivation and capacity to form and sustain these ties, highlighting psychological and structural factors that facilitate cooperation at a distance. Together, these findings suggest that long-distance relationships can serve as a foundation for scaling up collective action and designing management systems that bridge community boundaries.