Multi-stakeholder Networks Research Articles

Company-Based Welfare in Italy: Multi-Stakeholder Networks for Bridging the Gap between Large and Small-Medium Enterprises?

AbstractOver the last decade, in most Western countries, welfare states have faced increasing challenges due to several socioeconomic and cultural transformations. The economic crisis and austerity measures adopted in the aftermath of these challenges have increased the number of vulnerable people. Against this backdrop, this article aims to shed light on the development of company-based welfare in Italy by focusing specifically on the gap between large and small-medium enterprises and on emerging solutions addressed to fill this gap through the constitution of locally rooted, multi-actor networks. How do they originate? What are their main features? What contribution can they make to defusing the dualization between large, medium and small companies and workers? After reviewing these research questions, a description of the development of company-based welfare in Italy is provided in the first part of the article. We then describe and compare four local welfare networks, including small and medium enterprises, by looking at both their genetic and constitutive elements and their outputs.

A minimum evaluation protocol and stepped-wedge cluster randomized trial of ACCESS Open Minds, a large Canadian youth mental health services transformation project

BackgroundMany Canadian adolescents and young adults with mental health problems face delayed detection, long waiting lists, poorly accessible services, care of inconsistent quality and abrupt or absent inter-service transitions. To address these issues, ACCESS Open Minds, a multi-stakeholder network, is implementing and systematically evaluating a transformation of mental health services for youth aged 11 to 25 at 14 sites across Canada. The transformation plan has five key foci: early identification, rapid access, appropriate care, the elimination of age-based transitions between services, and the engagement of youth and families.MethodsThe ACCESS Open Minds Research Protocol has multiple components including a minimum evaluation protocol and a stepped-wedge cluster randomized trial, that are detailed in this paper. Additional components include qualitative methods and cost-effectiveness analyses. The services transformation is being evaluated at all sites via a minimum evaluation protocol. Six sites are participating in the stepped-wedge trial whereby the intervention (a service transformation along the key foci) was rolled out in three waves, each commencing six months apart. Two sites, one high-population and one low-population, were randomly assigned to each of the three waves, i.e., randomization was stratified by population size. Our primary hypotheses pertain to increased referral numbers, and reduced wait times to initial assessment and to the commencement of appropriate care. Secondary hypotheses pertain to simplified pathways to care; improved clinical, functional and subjective outcomes; and increased satisfaction among youth and families. Quantitative measures addressing these hypotheses are being used to determine the effectiveness of the intervention.DiscussionData from our overall research strategy will help test the effectiveness of the ACCESS Open Minds transformation, refine it further, and inform its scale-up. The process by which our research strategy was developed has implications for the practice of research itself in that it highlights the need to actively engage all stakeholder groups and address unique considerations in designing evaluations of complex healthcare interventions in multiple, diverse contexts. Our approach will generate both concrete evidence and nuanced insights, including about the challenges of conducting research in real-world settings. More such innovative approaches are needed to advance youth mental health services research.Trial registration numberClinicaltrials.gov, ISRCTN23349893 (Retrospectively registered: 16/02/2017).

The Local Governance of Migration

Over the past 20 years, Canadian immigration and integration policies have seen a considerable degree of decentralization and empowerment of the subnational level driven by the goal to align immigration policies more effectively with the needs and objectives of different communities. While the nation-state still has the prerogative as regards the recruitment progress, provinces and, often in a more informal capacity, cities have taken on a more pronounced role in attracting and settling newcomers. This article examines how, in the Canadian context, cities have been proactive in utilizing immigration as a tool to address local labour needs, to develop strategies for becoming “welcoming communities”, and to provide a sense of urban citizenship. Cities have responded to the challenge by building public-private partnerships in which settlement organizations, service providers, and employers play a prominent role. The most effective initiatives are those that increase the city’s ability to draw on multi-stakeholder networks and to enable policy coordination in Canada’s system of multilevel governance.

Towards sustainable business models for electric vehicle battery second use: A critical review

A global mass market adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is still hindered by the high costs of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). Repurposing degraded EV batteries in second use applications holds the potential to reduce first-cost impediments of EVs. New business models are emerging rapidly within the EV and battery second use (B2U) industries but they focus on economic aspects without integrating social and environmental dimensions. Simultaneously, the emerging research topic around sustainable business models (SBMs) seem to be able to bridge the environmental management concerns in conjunction with economic and social changes. This paper addresses this paucity in the literature by offering an interdisciplinary approach by drawing upon key perspectives from the emerging sustainable technology of EVs and its underlying B2U market in relation to SBMs. Findings reveal major contributions to theorists and practitioners. B2U holds the potential to facilitate current unsustainable practices in the EV industry. This in turn, will lead towards a faster EV market uptake and improvements of overall sustainability performance through SBM perspectives. Accordingly, a B2U business model framework is conceptualised that embodies the cross-sector multi-stakeholder impact and the shared value creation mechanism for the EV industry and emerging B2U market. We finally conclude that as such B2U holds the potential to prove itself to be a viable and efficient case for sustainability. This can be implemented by taking a multi-stakeholder network centric business model design compared to traditionally firm-centric models, which ultimately refreshes the traditional business models on sustainability.

Fostering social capital in an international multi-stakeholder issue network

Scholars have theorized that public relations contributes to societies and communities by bringing attention to pressing public issues and fostering social capital in civil society networks. However, the extant research has studied civil society networks of NGOs, donors, and the media in transitional countries. This study extends the public relations model of civil society in two ways. First, it broadens the scope to an international context. Second, it draws from the multi-stakeholder issue network perspective to conceptualize a civil society network as a space where stakeholders of an issue mix their interests as they collectively address a pressing public issue. The literature on international and multi-stakeholder networks suggest that the international scope and the mixing of interests across sectors may restrict the production of social capital. The results from the social network analysis suggests that the mixing of interests across sectoral and geopolitical boundaries did not restrict the production of social capital. Rather, the patterns of the relationships among those on the core and those on the periphery of the network restricted the production of social capital. Such finding demonstrates how public relations’ functions like relationship building can have profound influences on social capital and civil society networks. The implications for public relations theorizing and research are discussed.

(Un)learning the city through crisis: lessons from Cape Town

ABSTRACT Scholarly research has shown the importance of moments of crisis, in particular the direct aftermath of urban crises, as opportunities to learn about urban vulnerabilities. However, if it is widely assumed that learning is important, in particular for resilience-building, we still know very little about how such learning occurs in a moment of crisis. This paper starts addressing this gap, arguing that moments of crisis constitute a specific type of ‘learning space’. This proposition is taken forward through the analysis of a large-scale (social and humanitarian) urban crisis in the city of Cape Town. The paper maps out the emergence of multi-stakeholder knowledge networks throughout the crisis management process and explores the extent to which these were embedded into city-wide learning infrastructures after the crisis. It shows that moments of crisis represent an opportunity for ephemeral transsectorial knowledge coalitions to come about around issues that are made visible through the crisis itself. This can also be seen as an opportunity for potential learning spaces to open up.

Challenges of creating and capturing value in open eco-innovation: Evidence from the maritime industry in Denmark

Developing eco-innovations using open innovation comes with a distinct set of challenges as the dual goals of economic and environmental value creation produce tension that is not easily overcome in a multi-stakeholder network. These incongruent goals are inherent in an open eco-innovation network and potentially involve governmental agencies, regulators, and non-governmental organizations along with suppliers and other partners. Consequently, they add a layer of complexity to the creation and capture of value throughout the innovation network. Thus, in this study, we ask: What are the challenges in creating and capturing value in open eco-innovation networks?Based on an embedded case study of a network developing eco-innovation over a six-year period in the maritime industry in Denmark, this paper identifies challenges and links them to their impact on value creation and value capture. Our findings indicate that firms and partners are less innovative and more conservative in their approaches to innovation than has previously been observed in open-innovation partnerships. This research contributes to the eco-innovation knowledge base by demonstrating how extracting value from open eco-innovation is complicated as value is created at the micro and meso levels of the network, yet, a major goal of value capture is at the environment and social macro level. Thus, our results indicate that firms are less willing to commit resources and knowledge to co-creation, thereby negatively impacting value capture for the entire network, the society and/or the environment. Using open innovation to address “grand” societal challenges requires understanding value creation and value capture within this micro-meso-macro systemic framework of competing goals.

Culture, Technology, and Tourism (CTT) Theory:An Ontological Perspective

Author argues that Culture, Technology, and Tourism (CTT) is an integrated multidisciplinary. Therefore, author explores dimensionality of CTT Theory from various perspective. The results are: 1) local wisdom is the essence of the authenticity of cultural heritage; 2) local community as the actor should has the role to protect environment in order to ensure sustainability of tourism; 3) multistakeholder network should be managed as a pattern of complexity that characteristic of an integrated multidisciplinary; 4) creative economy and sociopreneurship as the enabler and driver of tourism entrepreneurship to ensure sustainability of tourism; 5) smart tourism that leverage the technology should be constructed through destination management in order to ensure sustainability of tourism and the authenticity of tourism; and 6) body-mind and hedonic-eudaimonic should be integrated to manage tourist’s well-being.  Refer to general system theory, author explains a CTT theory through relationship between those six results of dimensionality through input, process, output, and outcome relation.

Maximising the Effectiveness of Multi-Platform Networks in Health and Development: A Case Study of Be-Cause Health

Background: Networks have become a widely-used approach to address the complexity of issues around international health and health equity, and many types of networks have been described. The added value of networking is not straightforward and it should be documented. Be-Cause Health (BCH) is a unique, multistakeholder network linking the Belgian actors of the health and development sector, creating a partnership to support their commitment to equitable health. Consequently, BCH has very broad objectives with creative and dynamic outcomes. The aim of this study was to explore if the structure and process of the BCH network could be adapted to improve its effectiveness. Methods: The overall framework of the project included a narrative literature review combined with qualitative semi-structured interviews. The literature review looked at the structure and process of networks and the means of evaluating network effectiveness. The results of this review were used to inform the interviews of key Be-Cause Health members. Results: The reviewed articles illustrate the diversity of networking activities and the complexity of their evaluation, suggesting the use of participative evaluation methods to capture the intangible outcomes as experienced by the members themselves. The interviewees reported that the major benefits of their BCH membership were information sharing and connecting with peers. They felt the growth of the BCH network was mostly related to its culture of trust among members, to the inspiring leadership, to the concrete activities it could organise, to its flexible structure tailored to their needs,and to the support of the secretariat and to the embeddedness of the network in a wider institution with secured public funding. They identified a need for improved internal and external communication and for more concrete objectives of the working groups. Conclusion: The BCH network is a unique response to the complex challenges of health equity and development. The outcomes of such complex networks cannot be measured with a simple quantitative method, and require participative methods of evaluation. There is no formula to predict the change of effectiveness that would result from a change of structure.

‘Living with the floods’: the influence of relational and cognitive capital on disaster risk management capacities in Ratnapura, Sri Lanka

Developing multi-stakeholder networks to transfer response and recovery related knowledge between government agencies and flood-prone communities has become an important component of contemporary d...

Decision support system for designing sustainable multi-stakeholder networks of grain storage facilities in developing countries

Governments in developing countries often face the daunting task of designing a network of grain storage facilities to simultaneously benefit the various stakeholders (farmers, market traders, exporters, etc.) in the grain supply chain irrespective of the conflicting objectives of these stakeholders. Existing decision support systems either require data that are unavailable in most developing countries or have objectives irrelevant in the context of developing countries. This paper therefore develops a decision support system that integrates transportation, pseudo p-median, forecasting and goal programming models to optimally design networks of grain storage facilities to reduce the transportation cost of respective stakeholders. The effectiveness of the proposed decision support system has been demonstrated by comparing phantom networks developed with the decision support system to the Government of Ghana’s network of 48 grain storage facilities.

Learning Alliance Methodology Contributions to Integrated Care Research

The regular cycle of conducting research when applied to human services is considered linear and rarely beneficial to all stakeholders involved directly or indirectly in a research project (service users, policy-makers, funders, local authorities, taxpayers). Funders of research, taxpayers, policy-makers and governments are increasingly questioning the linear process of conducting research and are demanding a higher socio-economic and scientific impact. New approaches seeking to re-think the utilisation, appropriation and impact of research outcomes in the health services area in more integrated ways, include the Learning Alliance (LA) methodology. Formally defined, an LA is “a series of connected multi-stakeholder platforms or networks (practitioner, researchers, policy-makers, service users) at different institutional levels (local, national) involved in two basic tasks: knowledge innovation and its scaling up. Methods: The methodological tools in an LA are various and can be used according to the convenience, context, theme and needs of a project. The most common ones are stakeholder analysis, research or action research, process documentation, dissemination and capacity building, among others. By applying the LA, the three projects briefly mentioned here sought to demonstrate that this approach could contribute to increasing their scientific and socio-economic impact while simultaneously generating learning among all stakeholders in more integrated ways. Results: Three projects using the LA have been completed as recently as 2017 and have covered different health themes, services and locations: identification of health needs of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) groups in the South East of England; perpetration of Intimate Partner Violence by Males in Substance Abuse Treatment in Brazil and England; and Attitudes to Palliative and End of Life Care Services among BME Groups in the South East of England. Overall, the three research experiences in combination with the use of stakeholders’ participation and documentation revealed that the role of the LA methodology demonstrates significant issues. First, it contributed to narrowing the dominant gap between research and practice that is so common in health services by bringing together several stakeholders (policy-makers, service users, service providers) who are not involved in research on a daily basis. Through knowledge sharing, all stakeholders benefited from the research projects’ outcomes. Second, the documentation of events in the projects become a significant source of additional data in which impact and the know-how got captured. Similarly, documentation and dissemination of preliminary findings in the three cases comprised a tool for promoting changes in attitudes and mindsets that translated faster into adoption of integrated changes in practice. Third, the work undertaken as a network, enabled all stakeholders to understand that the research projects could be more than the traditional linear processes. The research projects’ outcomes benefited stakeholders in different ways beyond the traditional research products (academic papers or technologies) to include other social, personal and institutional processes that occur in a project, and demonstrated a better impact. Conclusion: The application of the LA methodology maximised the value of conducting research as a network by including various stakeholders and not only researchers to integrate research, practice, learning and policy issues in health services.

Regional Centres of Expertise (RCEs), Green Economies and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) as Dialogue: Who is Expert?

As a central part of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) from 2005 to 2014 Regional Centres of Expertise (RCE) serve as agents of education for sustainable development through multi-stakeholder networks with an interest in the advancement of sustainable societies. In this article, the question is raised about the nature of ‘expertise’ found among RCE programmes directed towards the development of local green economies; and further, the implications of expertise with respect to the practice among RCEs of education for sustainable development worldwide. Regional Centres of Expertise have put into practice a range of approaches to ESD, some based on a knowledge-transfer approach to learning, which positions post-secondary education as well as other authoritative technical and research institutions as the principal overseers of knowledge and expertise; however, social learning through the facilitation, or convening, of dialogue has also been adopted as an approach to learning that is inclusive of civil society and marginalized others, with implications for social and environmental justice.

Network Administrative Organizations Legitimizing Multi-Stakeholder Networks (WITHDRAWN)

Drawing on a multi-method case study of a development organization that worked for an inclusive dairy value chain in Ethiopia, this paper examines the role of Network Administrative Organizations (NAOs) in building multi-stakeholder networks to address social challenges in emerging markets. We highlight how NAOs promote the exchange of knowledge as well as the development of the governance capacity among network participants by organizing event-series. We further identify the boundary conditions for the success of these activities. Not only are internal and external network legitimacy relevant as existing literature suggests but we also found that the legitimacy of the NAO itself is critical for explaining the efficacy of multi-stakeholder networks. Overall, this article contributes to the literature on cross-sector collaborations by uncovering the evolution and outcomes of purposefully engineered multi-stakeholder networks by NAOs.

Beyond Biodiversity Conservation: Why Policy Needs Social Theory, Social Theory Needs Justice, and Justice Needs Policy

Beyond Biodiversity Conservation: Why Policy Needs Social Theory, Social Theory Needs Justice, and Justice Needs Policy

More Efficient Compliance with European Medicines Agency and Food and Drug Administration Regulations for Pediatric Oncology Drug Development: Problems and Solutions

The morbidity and mortality toll of pediatric cancer affects the public health of children worldwide, but despite the gains in the fight against cancer, more progress needs to take place against this disease, which is a leading cause of death and chronic disability in children. In response, leading regulatory authorities in the developed world have been ratcheting up their efforts to induce the private sector to expand their research and development focus during drug development for adult cancers to include children. In mid-May 2016, the Center for the Study of Drug Development at Tufts University held a roundtable workshop on pediatric oncology to explore how companies could maximize the efficiency of pediatric assessment of adult cancer indications while minimizing resource expenditures to comply with regulatory requirements under the European Medicines Agency and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Although worldwide a child is diagnosed with cancer every 3 minutes, pediatric cancer is a rare disease, and trial participants are hard to come by. Thus, the market hardly sustains research and development expenses, advances in pharmacogenomics are not reaching down the age scale, and even in the public sector, basic research funding for pediatric cancer pales in comparison to the amount spent on cancer overall. The goal of the roundtable was to acknowledge these problems, and more importantly, to raise the level of awareness of potential solutions, including: more efficient use of the data hierarchy of informative events in clinical trials; new innovative clinical trial platforms for rapid assessment of new drugs in children; new developments in formulation technology; and optimization of speed in pediatric drug development through a multi-stakeholder network collaboration separate from the adult development plan.

Stakeholder roles for fostering ambidexterity in Sub-Saharan African agricultural netchains for the emergence of multi-stakeholder cooperatives

Abstract The Sub-Saharan African smallholder agricultural sector faces multiple and usually complex challenges, which can potentially be overcome by collective action. Smallholder farmers and other value chain stakeholders can tackle temporal, structural and contextual challenges by joining multi-level innovation networks to benefit collectively from shared information, knowledge, improved capacities and economies of scale in a process of innovation. Ambidexterity is a capability of innovation networks to balance exploration and exploitation dynamics in an innovation process, and is applicable at multiple levels: individuals, leaders, champions, teams and clusters. In the paradigm of open innovation, these levels become intertwined in hybrid social structures of innovation netchains. The objective of this paper is to describe the roles and identify the stakeholders that play those roles in an innovation process. We present case studies on farmer groups who participate in collective action and we compare multi-stakeholder platforms with other configurations of actors that tackle challenges in potato netchains in three Sub-Saharan African countries. We track and analyse innovation trajectories for six cases adapting netchain analysis techniques linking roles with the challenges faced at particular stages of each innovation trajectory. We find three management designs for fostering exploration and exploitation: (1) exploratory or exploitative management designs for small innovation networks; (2) exploitative management designs for larger networks; and (3) ambidextrous management designs for multi-stakeholder networks. Traditional roles played by managers are identified to manage exploration and exploitation in an ambidextrous way, but also evidence of roles of civil society actors facilitating collective action for the emergence of multi-stakeholder cooperatives. Since ambidexterity is about dynamism, we identified three types of mobility to be fostered when tackling challenges in an innovation process: (1) mobility-dynamism of the innovation process over time; (2) structural-knowledge mobility in innovation networks; and (3) boundary mobility.

Networked CSR Governance: A Whole Network Approach to Meta-Governance

Meta-governance is Earth system governance for dealing with the global commons. This article develops a whole network approach to meta-governance to explore the potential for collective action for sustainable development by a loosely coupled network of networks. Networked corporate social responsibility (CSR) governance has emerged around corporate sustainability and responsibility in the first years of the 21st century. Growing agreements and interactions among CSR initiatives suggest the development, structure, and governance of networked CSR governance as a network that can analytically be viewed as a whole and as a platform for learning about systemic change. Using the evolution of CSR initiatives from about 1990 to 2014, the authors differentiate four developmental stages: independent and fragmented multistakeholder networks as CSR governance, collaborative CSR governance, networked CSR governance, and integrated networked CSR governance. The authors then present a framework to analyze networked CSR governance as a whole network experimenting with meta-governance.

Value Creation from Internationalization of Sugar Cane by-products: a multi-stakeholder view of artisanal cachaça production

Objective – The aim of this paper was to identify the strategies developed for internationalization in order to create value in the artisanal cachaca sector of Brazil. Design/methodology/approach – A multiple-case study was applied in two artisanal cachacarias. we carried out in-depth, semi-structured interviews with different stakeholders involved in supporting internationalization of these companies. To select the stakeholders we used snowball sampling. The content of the interviews was categorized and analysed according to accepted theory. Findings – Our study provides an overview of the organization and structure of the cachacarias and reveals how internationalization is adding value to this network from a multi-stakeholder view. The support of the multi-stakeholder network is in an early stage, but it offers a promising future, since there is a consumer market being developed. Political power is needed to regulate the industry. Practical implications – Business internationalization of the handmade cachaca sector is a challenge, as most companies are small and do not have adequate financial resources or proper knowledge regarding international markets. Regulatory stakeholders support the cachacarias in standardizing production and developing international strategies. The results can help to better understand the importance of collaboration embedded in stakeholder network relationships.

Translational networks in healthcare? Evidence on the design and initiation of organizational networks for knowledge mobilization

International attention has focussed on the variations between research evidence and practice in healthcare. This prompted the creation of formalized translational networks consisting of academic-service partnerships. The English Collaborations for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRCs) are one example of a translational network. Using longitudinal, archival case study data from one CLAHRC over a 3-year period (2008-11), this article explores the relationship between organizational form and the function(s) of a translational network. The article focuses on the research gaps on the effective structures and appropriate governance to support a translational network. Data analysis suggested that the policy of setting up translational networks is insufficient of itself to produce positive translational activity. The data indicate that to leverage the benefits of the whole network, attention must be paid to devising a structure which integrates research production and use and facilitates lateral cross-disciplinary and cross-organizational communication. Equally, appropriate governance arrangements are necessary, particularly in large, multi-stakeholder networks, where shared governance may be questionable. Inappropriate network structure and governance inhibits the potential of the translational network. Finally, the case provides insights into the movement of knowledge within and between network organizations. The data demonstrate that knowledge mobilization extends beyond knowledge translation; knowledge mobilization includes the negotiated utilization of knowledge – a balanced power form of collaboration. Whilst much translational effort is externally focused on the health system, our findings highlight the essential need for the internal negotiation and mobilization of knowledge within academia.