This paper focuses on addressing the importance of governing collaborative networks. Such collaboration arrangements face barriers and need governance to coordinate their actions to overcome obstacles and also to organize their activities in the pursuit of their members’ common goals. One of the main barriers faced by network governance is the balance among coordination and cooperation, or authority and autonomy. It is necessary to create a collaborative environment, where the network members feel they are part of the process, but also one that guides the process in the right direction. Therefore, we proposed that looking at collaborative network governance is exploring its microstructure, represented by the functions, and analyzing those from the authority and autonomy perspective. Approaching network governance from this perspective, generating a theoretical stance on it, gives future studies a path to go forwards, using the functions as microstructures from where to ground research, especially when thinking about what can replace authority in horizontal network governance relation.