Challenges and Strategies in Place-Based Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration for Sustainability: Learning from Experiences in the Global South

Abstract

Addressing complex environmental problems requires the collaboration of stakeholders with divergent perspectives, a goal that is challenged by diverse factors. Challenges hindering multi-stakeholder collaboration (MSC) for sustainability have previously been addressed in the context of transnational partnerships. However, less is known regarding how place-based MSC operates, especially in the context of the Global South. To contribute to addressing the factors that hinder place-based MSC for sustainability in the Global South, we analyzed 38 MSC projects spanning diverse ecological and social contexts across Mexico. In a series of participatory workshops, 128 stakeholders from academia, government, business, local communities, and civil society organizations discussed factors that hinder place-based MSC and co-constructed strategies to strengthen collaboration. Some challenges coincided with those identified in previous studies (e.g., divergent visions, inadequate project planning), whereas other concerns that have not been commonly regarded as important emerged as crucial obstacles for MSC. We discuss these challenges in the context of areas of limited statehood and point to the traditions of popular education and participatory action research as a source of valuable tools for place-based MSC. We identify strategies capable of addressing diverse challenges, a result that could aid prioritizing resource allocation to strengthen MSC.

Analysing Organisational Collaboration Practices for Sustainability

“…During the last decades, an increasing number of organisations have started to engage in sustainability activities to deal with environmental and social issues society is facing [1]. Handling the complexity of sustainability issues, however, often exceeds the capabilities of an individual organisation [2][3][4]. Collaboration for sustainability has, therefore, been recognised as a key element to solve complex sustainability problems and as one of the principles of a sustainable organisation [1,5,6].…”

“…In particular, interaction with multiple stakeholders has been recognised as essential to solve sustainability issues and to create value for sustainability [4,11]. Several scholars [12][13][14] have shown the influence of stakeholders on the implementation of sustainability practices, and how these practices Sustainability 2020, 12, 2466 3 of 21 shift from individual action towards partnership.…”

“…A growing number of studies on multi-stakeholder collaboration practices for sustainability can be found on the shift towards collaborative sustainable governance [72,73] and on collaborative networks, involving different stakeholder groups, e.g., public agencies, NGOs, and various private companies [4,28,74]. However, these studies are mainly place-or issue-based with a focus on strategies and challenges experienced by the network as a whole, while there is little research on multi-stakeholder collaboration activities from the perspective of individual organisations.…”

“…In particular multi-stakeholder collaboration has been recognised as being crucial to solve sustainability issues by a growing number of scholars [4,28,74]. However, most research on collaboration for sustainability focuses on strategies, problems and collaborative advantages for individual organisations in dyadic relationships [18,29,61] or issue-focussed collaborative networks [4,28,83]. As such, there is little knowledge of collaboration practices of individual organisations with multiple stakeholders considering how their sustainability efforts may affect and are also affected by these stakeholders.…”

“…However, while the challenges, benefits, and performance implications of collaboration have been investigated in detail [24][25][26], there is still limited knowledge about the collaboration practices of organisations to foster their sustainability efforts and how stakeholders affecting and being affected by such efforts, beyond economic gains, are considered [10,27]. Most efforts on organisational collaboration practices have focussed on case studies investigating collaborative stakeholder networks to solve specific sustainability issues [4,28] and vertical and dyadic collaboration relationships [18,29,30], while there is a lack of empirical studies on overarching organisational collaboration activities for sustainability [31,32]. This underlines the need to shift focus from whether to how collaboration activities with stakeholders should be formed and extended, and to investigate organisational collaboration practices including vertical and horizontal stakeholders [22,30,32].Aiming to answer this research gap, the objective of this paper is to analyse organisational collaboration practices for sustainability.…”