Understanding how different networks relate to each other is key for obtaining a greater insight into complex systems. Here, we introduce an intuitive yet powerful framework to characterise the relationship between two networks comprising the same nodes. We showcase our framework by decomposing the shortest paths between nodes as being contributed uniquely by one or the other source network, or redundantly by either, or synergistically by the two together. Our approach takes into account the networks' full topology, and it also provides insights at multiple levels of resolution: from global statistics, to individual paths of different length. We show that this approach is widely applicable, from brains to the London public transport system. In humans and across 123 other mammalian species, we demonstrate that reliance on unique contributions by long-range white matter fibers is a conserved feature of mammalian structural brain networks. Across species, we also find that efficient communication relies on significantly greater synergy between long-range and short-range fibers than expected by chance, and significantly less redundancy. Our framework may find applications to help decide how to trade-off different desiderata when designing network systems, or to evaluate their relative presence in existing systems, whether biological or artificial.

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