What It Takes to Lead Sustainability Transitions from the Bottom-Up: Strategic Interactions of Grassroots Ecopreneurs

Abstract

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.

Business Model Experimentation for the Circular Economy: Definition and Approaches

“…The literature search also identified diverse business contexts, e.g. grassroots organizations [44], startup [45], social businesses [46], and large established businesses [22]. Some of the longstanding and ongoing areas of research in this review focus on (electric) mobility (e.g.…”

“…Other pockets of research relate to business experimentation in city contexts [47,50,51], buildings [52,53], clothing (e.g. [22,54]), and farming [44,55,56]. Rather specialized, washing machines were represented with three papers [16,57,58].…”

“…For example, some authors used the Business Model Canvas in a sustainability context (e.g. [44,71]), whereas others evolved the canvas (e.g. [12]) or referred to the Lean Startup (e.g.…”

“…Using experimentation as an approach to innovation, some articles used an action-oriented research approach with a variation of techniques [12,44,54,69]. Bocken et al [54] draw on Ries' [36] and Blank's [80] interpretations of an experimental learning approach.…”

The transgressive gardener : Cultivating learning-based transformations towards regenerative futures

“…The design process requires the researcher to be a facilitator, designing with all stakeholders involved. This highly participatory process is also iterative, making room for cycles of action and reflection, which to me was the key aspect of the process [277]. Sitting together to reflect on what happens throughout the project loosens the tension related to the outcome of the research process.…”