Cross-Sector Partnerships for Sustainable Development: Understanding Community (dis)Engagement

Abstract

The growing complexity of grand challenges such as sustainable development has drawn attention to cross-sector social partnerships (CSSPs) as platforms to solve wicked problems. In management studies in general, and in CSSP studies in particular the “local” and the “community” have reemerged as operational spaces and units of study, yet the lack of a clear definition and the interchangeable use of community in the literature presents an opportunity for management scholars. By using an alternative conceptualization of community, which emphasizes communities as relational systems between actors relative to the purpose of the CSSP, this paper uses a case-study approach with three embedded units CSSPs for sustainable development of the bamboo industry in an indigenous region in Mexico. I propose a typology for the different types of engagement and disengagement of actors that affect and are affected by the CSSP relational system which goes beyond the partners and beneficiaries. I look at the factors that explain these different types of engagement and disengagement and how they affect the CSSP. This study contributes to the CSSP literature by broadening the scope of how we define CSSP communities and by deepening our understanding of interactions between system context, CSSP antecedents and the different types of engagement of the CSSP community.