Agenda

This event is part of VSM Lectures, a series of seminars given by top scholars from international universities and institutions, who are invited to present their research, related results and impact on societal issues.

Cross-sector partnerships and socio-ecological systems’ change: A transdisciplinary perspective

VSM lecture held by Domenico Dentoni,  Professor of Business, Resilience and Transformation at Montpellier Business School, Montpellier. 

The event will be also available online via Gmeet

Abstract
A rich literature suggests that inter-organizational coordination – mutually adjusting actions of multiple organizations to reach a common vision – helps address complex societal issues. Yet, we still know little about building inter-organizational coordination across scales, that is, across geographically, culturally, and politically distant actors. Cross-scale coordination currently represents a puzzle in a variety of current societal change processes; for example, in the agri-food sector worldwide, cross-scale coordination would be sorely needed to accelerate climate adaptation and mitigation while tackling issues of food insecurity and rural poverty. To develop a management theory of building coordination across scales, we leverage and experiment with the notion of participatory systems mapping; this is the process of co-creating visual representations of interconnected agents involved into a common societal problem. From two years of action research embedded in a European agri-food sectoral transformation project, we identified three iterative practices for participatory systems mapping processes to support the development of cross-scale coordination: co-designing, co-experimenting, and co-assessing. This systems-based view of building cross-scale coordination empirically contributes, first, to the emerging field of systems thinking approaches in management studies and, second, to the established field of on scaling impact
in the social innovation studies.