Scaling Out, Scaling Down : Reconsidering growth in grassroots initiatives (original) (raw)
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Global Environmental Change, 2013
Civil society is a critical arena both for exploring Sustainability itself and for sustaining trajectories towards it through innovation, experimentation and debate. Innovations can be mould breaking and can challenge local institutions. Concurrently, initiatives may be fragile due to the development of new working relationships, reliance on voluntary labour and goodwill, and dependence on grant funding. Here we examine different aspects of what it takes to sustain grassroots trajectories for ‘communal growing’, given the pressures that groups and intermediary organisations practicing and supporting this activity experience, and the consequential need to build qualities like ‘resilience’. Attending carefully to the definition of this otherwise slippery concept, a particular focus is given to how contrasting aspects of temporality and agency lead to divergent constructions of ‘resilience’ and strategies for sustaining growing. We draw on fieldwork that explores the practice and support of communal growing in East Sussex, England, and directly associated activities at a national level. We find important interdependencies between communal growing projects and the intermediary organisations supporting them. Additionally there is huge diversity within and between both projects and the organisations that support them, including with respect to the ends to which growing is seen as a means. These ends link growing initiatives – both antagonistically and synergistically – to food, education and health systems. This diversity can be seen positively as: a source of innovation; facilitating the open and bottom up nature of growing; and, enabling the securing of greater financial support for the endeavour. What is less clear is how this plays into framing and configuring communal growing specifically in relation to achieving a more Sustainable and localised food system. We discuss the conceptual and methodological implications of these empirically derived observations with regards future research on grassroots innovations.
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The article seeks to further our understanding of the process of organizing nascent social ventures. It builds upon current research on the political and collaborative nature of the social entrepreneurial process, and takes an ANT-inspired processual approach to follow the organizational practices carried by a nascent social venture in its efforts to mobilize stakeholders, bring about collaboration and ultimately secure resources. It draws upon empirical material generated during the first year of FiC, a social venture I founded and continue to chair. Findings highlight the adaptive and fluid nature of the organizational practices involved in nascent organizations and indicate that the capacity to continuously adjust the qualities of the eventual venture to the stakes of potential partners is instrumental to start up the venture. The article suggests the notion of tinkering to underscore the fluidity, the ongoing and piecemeal everyday work of such organizing processes. Further, findings highlight the extent to which social ventures, as well as the engaged scholar, are caught in the networks that contribute to reproduce the problem they aim to change.
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