Collective action for the commons: Stakeholder engagement and polycentricity: YHYS Session 15

Natural resources, such as genetic diversity, species richness, and ecosystem services are accessible for use by everybody but are limited and affected by human overexploitation. What makes these environmental resources special is that they involve commons (Ostrom, 1990). The struggle of the commons is a complex situation in which a large set of individuals, businesses, and other organizations has access to those resources and degrades them based on their own self-interest and without any clear rules of use (). This struggle is a social dilemma, and it would be better for the parties to cooperate, but they fail to do so due to conflicts between organizational interests that discourage joint action (Aligica & Tarko, 2012).

In 1990, E. Ostrom proposed a theory that explains how to overcome this struggle of the commons. She studied how individuals and local communities can create and organize institutions for collective action, designing shared rules defined by local users to govern commons resources cooperatively. Polycentricity is a key concept in Ostrom’s research, emerging as an alternative to centralized governance models (Ostrom, 2010; Aligica & Tarko, 2012). Polycentric governance refers to a system based on multiple, interdependent, and autonomous decision-making centers that enable cross-sector actors to manage complex collective action problems (McGinnis, 2016). Polycentricity is a form of adaptive governance that allows multiple stakeholders, including individuals and organizations, to define rules to govern complex interactions, natural resources, circularity, and sustainable consumption (Patala et al., 2022). Commons and collective action are important drivers of research in social and environmental sciences that offer opportunities to explore new concepts such as commoning (Bollier & Helfrich, 2015) or commons organizing (Albareda & Sison, 2020).

We call for a discussion between commons, polycentricity and stakeholder theory (Freeman, 1984, Freeman et al., 2010) to understand business-stakeholder value-creation to prevent the collapse of the commons in the Anthropocene. We embrace the interconnected relationships between cross-sector actors and stakeholder engagement to address the struggle of the commons. We see “stakeholder engagement” (Freeman et al., 2017; Kujala & Sachs, 2019) as a change in focus from a business-centric view to a relational perspective in which both economic and non-economic value is created through complex stakeholder relationships (Tapaninaho & Kujala, 2019). Stakeholder theory explicitly acknowledges that joint value creation necessitates stakeholder engagement in the face of collective action and governance systems, for this adopting learning and deliberation processes (Bridoux & Stoelhorts, 2020; McGahan & Pongeluppe, 2023).

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