Breaking the Cycle of Marginalization: How to Involve Local Communities in Multi-stakeholder Initiatives?
J Bus Ethics
; : 1-32, 2022 Sep 22.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-36187729
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. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10551-022-05252-5.
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Language:
En
Journal:
J Bus Ethics
Journal subject:
ETICA
Year:
2022
Document type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Netherlands