This paper studies features of grassroots ecopreneurs' leadership in their attempt to ignite transformations in production-consumption systems from the bottom up. It builds on a comprehensive approach of change agency based on institutional work, innovation, and learning intermediation literature. The paper describes grassroots ecopreneurs' interaction strategies to resource business models for sustainability. Empirical data comes from an action research project that consisted of implementing a sustainability experiment in Sur de Bolívar (Colombia). The experiment shows grassroots ecopreneurs' arrays of activities around making sense, shaping, securing support, nurturing, expanding, and scaling the value proposition, the business infrastructure, the customer interface and the financial model of their ventures. Our findings suggest that leading businesses transition into a more sustainable field requires grassroots ecopreneurs acting as change agents by performing a diverse array of boundary, practice, and knowledge circulation strategies, aiming at securing the societal and environmental impact of their ventures. Change agency manifests in the ways ecopreneurs maneuver to bring about transformations and strive to sustain it. The study contributes to a better understanding of processes of socio-technical change for sustainability in highly diverse institutional contexts, such as (but not exclusively) the developing world. An agency-based approach is proposed as an alternative to a managerial approach.
A growing number of local green roof niches across the globe are transitioning into the mainstream domain. Guidelines are key to this process, as they define technological environments and set the criteria for best practices in a given socio-technical setting. Although the German Forschungsgesellschaft Landschaftsentwicklung Landschaftsbau (FLL) cornerstone guidelines provided solid empirical ground and established technical parameters for the successful application of green roofs across continents, investigations about alternative green roof guidelines for emerging markets remain very scarce. The paper presents the inclusive approach followed by the Bogota Green Roof Guidelines, which were the result of a multi-actor participatory process that examined how to embrace a wide range of emerging green roof technologies and local adaptations while promoting quality of application at different scales, regardless of the system used, and despite the absence of local robust empirical data on performance parameters. As a result, Bogota’s Green Roof Guidelines incorporated ad hoc elements: (1) new definitions and taxonomy, (2) function-based contents, (3) multi-scale approach, and (4) performance scoping. These aspects are discussed to provide novel insights for the advancement of green infrastructure policies in diverse institutional settings aiming to promote quality and simultaneously support markets that make room for a wide variety of green infrastructure practices.
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