Breaking the Cycle of Marginalization: How to Involve Local Communities in Multi-stakeholder Initiatives?

Manon Eikelenboom () and Thomas B. Long ()
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Manon Eikelenboom: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Thomas B. Long: University of Groningen, Campus Fryslân

Journal of Business Ethics, 2023, vol. 186, issue 1, No 3, 62 pages

Abstract: Abstract While the benefits of including local communities in multi-stakeholder initiatives have been acknowledged, their successful involvement remains a challenging process. Research has shown that large business interests are regularly over-represented and that local communities remain marginalized in the process. Additionally, little is known about how procedural fairness and inclusion can be managed and maintained during multi-stakeholder initiatives. The aim of this study was therefore to investigate how marginalized stakeholders, and local communities in particular, can be successfully involved during the course of a multi-stakeholder initiative. An action research approach was adopted where the first author collaborated with a social housing association on an initiative to involve the local community in the design and implementation of circular economy approaches in a low-income neighbourhood. This study contributes to the multi-stakeholder initiative literature by showing that the successful involvement of marginalized stakeholders requires the initiators to continuously manage a balance between uncertainty–certainty, disagreement–agreement and consensus- and domination-based management strategies. Furthermore, our study highlights that factors which are regularly treated as challenges, including uncertainty and disagreement, can actually play a beneficial role in multi-stakeholder initiatives, emphasizing the need to take a temporally sensitive approach. This study also contributes to the circular economy literature by showing how communities can play a bigger role than merely being consumers, leading to the inclusion of a socially oriented perspective which has not been recognized in the previous literature.

Keywords: Multi-stakeholder initiatives; Community involvement; Action research (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1007/s10551-022-05252-5

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