Analysing Organisational Collaboration Practices for Sustainability

Lea Fobbe
Additional contact information
Lea Fobbe: Faculty of Engineering and Sustainable Development, University of Gävle, 80267 Gävle, Sweden

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 6, 1-21

Abstract: The complex sustainability challenges that society faces require organisations to engage in collaborative partnerships. Stakeholders affect, and are affected by an organisation’s sustainability activities, making it an important element when deciding with whom to collaborate. A large number of studies have focussed on collaboration for sustainability, especially on vertical and dyadic partnerships and collaborative networks, while there is limited research on overarching collaboration activities from the perspective of individual organisations (for example, the Kyosei approach), and even less that includes a stakeholder perspective. The objective of this paper is to analyse with whom individual organisations collaborate and how stakeholders affecting and being affected by sustainability efforts are considered when choosing collaboration partners. A survey was sent to a database of 5216 organisations, from which 271 responses were received. The responses were analysed using non-parametric tests. The results show that organisations are engaged in collaboration activities for sustainability, collaborating mostly with two to three external stakeholders. However, the focus on collaboration for sustainability does not extend to a point that it would lead to a change of organisational practice nor do organisations necessarily consider how stakeholders affect and are affected by their efforts when choosing their collaboration partners. An update to the Kyosei process is proposed, in order to provide guidance on how to strengthen and extend collaborative partnerships for sustainability.

Keywords: organisations; collaboration for sustainability; stakeholder; multi-stakeholder collaboration; partnerships; Kyosei (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/6/2466/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/6/2466/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:6:p:2466-:d:335174

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().