This paper explores the theoretical underpinnings of collaboration and ecosystem management in order to identify the relationships and processes involved in implementing ecosystem management programs through cross-sector collaboration. Ecosystem management requires a highly adaptive and resilient social-ecological governance approach, which addresses spatiality and temporality issues. In order to explore possible implementation issues with ecosystem management, propositions are developed dealing with adaptive governance, institutional isomorphism and collective action. The paper concludes with a discussion of the theoretic underpinnings involved in implementing ecosystem management through cross-sector collaborations.
Despite a wealth of expertise involving leading institutions over at least 15 years, a base of the pyramid (BoP) model resulting in scalability has yet to emerge. We posit that institutional gaps between BoP goals of developing human and social capital on one hand and a short‐term profit focus of business on the other contribute to the lack of scalability. We address this gap by proposing a social intermediary to link the BoP with firms involved in the BoP. The social intermediary will coordinate and interpret the informal market requirements of the BoP to the firm in a “bottoms up” approach. We illustrate the bottoms up approach through a case involving Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit, a German government agency, with the garment manufacturing industry in Pakistan. The case study involves implementation of labor standards and productivity in the Pakistan garment industry, resulting in improved productivity and labor standards enabling garment manufacturers to access global supply chains.
To differentiate ecosystem management, three models of firm-level environmental stewardship are paired with three types of trust, which serve as informal governance mechanisms. The interconnectedness of organizational fields and the influence of intertemporality and interspatiality (time and space) are key dynamics in developing decentralized networks as an approach for linking firms, organizational fields, and global sustainability efforts. Interviews with 18 firms, government agencies, and nonprofit-making organizations from Japan and the USA are utilized to discuss the key concepts in the paper.
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