Breaking the Cycle of Marginalization: How to Involve Local Communities in Multi-stakeholder Initiatives?

Abstract

While the benefits of including local communities in multi-stakeholder initiatives have been acknowledged, their successful involvement remains a challenging process. Research has shown that large business interests are regularly over-represented and that local communities remain marginalized in the process. Additionally, little is known about how procedural fairness and inclusion can be managed and maintained during multi-stakeholder initiatives. The aim of this study was therefore to investigate how marginalized stakeholders, and local communities in particular, can be successfully involved during the course of a multi-stakeholder initiative. An action research approach was adopted where the first author collaborated with a social housing association on an initiative to involve the local community in the design and implementation of circular economy approaches in a low-income neighbourhood. This study contributes to the multi-stakeholder initiative literature by showing that the successful involvement of marginalized stakeholders requires the initiators to continuously manage a balance between uncertainty–certainty, disagreement–agreement and consensus- and domination-based management strategies. Furthermore, our study highlights that factors which are regularly treated as challenges, including uncertainty and disagreement, can actually play a beneficial role in multi-stakeholder initiatives, emphasizing the need to take a temporally sensitive approach. This study also contributes to the circular economy literature by showing how communities can play a bigger role than merely being consumers, leading to the inclusion of a socially oriented perspective which has not been recognized in the previous literature.

Governance Through Trust: Community Engagement in an Australian City Rebuilding Precinct

“…Our findings on the circuitry nature of trust building is supported by de Oliveira and Rabechini (2019) who stress the importance of sustaining trust after the start of the project. Similarly, Eikelenboom and Long (2022) call for continuous management strategies for successfully engaging local communities. We extend this literature further by showing the circuitry practice of building trust where the trust-building strategies of employing resources, building legitimacy, and creating a brand are repeated in cycles to continuously engage and sustain trust.…”

“…Fourth, using the circuits of power framework, we highlight how trust-building strategies interact with each other and evolve as a form of governance through trust. Finally, while the importance of sustaining trust after the start of the project is stressed in the literature (Eikelenboom & Long, 2022; de Oliveira & Rabechini, 2019), we record how trust-building strategies work in a circuitry process to continuously engage and sustain trust with the project community.…”

Realizing potential: a real option perspective on communities of practice in organizational transformation

“…For example, impressionist painters might independently practice their craft, but they constitute a CoP when they regularly convene in cafes or studios to converse about techniques, artworks, and peers' works. CoPs extend beyond mere interest groups (Eikelenboom & Long, 2023) and consist of practitioners who frequently share narratives, experiences, solutions, and results pertaining to professional challenges (Lesser & Everest, 2001;Lave & Wenger, 1991;Wenger, 1998). Mohajan (2017) highlighted various essential roles of Communities of Practice (CoPs), including (a) bolstering strategic capabilities, (b) spawning new business initiatives, (c) expediting problem-solving, (d) evolving towards best practices, (e) fostering specialized methodologies, and (f) contributing to talent acquisition and retention.…”

How do stakeholder groups make sense of sustainability: Analysing differences in the complexity of their cognitive frames

“…At the same time, prior research has shown that the interests, in particular of large businesses, are often over-represented relative to those of other stakeholders, not least to those of local communities (Eikelenboom & Long, 2023). Hence, recent work on stakeholder engagement has brought a greater recognition of the role of contestation (Bitzer & Schouten, 2023).…”

“…Organizations of all sectors are increasingly expected to integrate the multiplicity of these dimensions into their strategy and operations; yet differences persist in the degree to which their overarching logic addresses these. Contrast, for example, a primary focus of the private sector on the economic dimension of sustainability (Eikelenboom & Long, 2023; Hockerts, 2015), with attention in NGOs to a much wider range of dimensions (Arenas et al, 2009). These differences in strategic and operational preferences, we suggest, translate into greater or smaller opportunities for decision‐makers to develop cognitive complexity on sustainability.…”