Apex Predators in the Meta-Organization

When an organization joins a meta-organization, an extra layer of decision making is added. Consequently, all the members of an organization get concentrated in one representative in the meta-organization. We describe these representatives as apex predators, not because they lack enemies but because each of them is a personified accumulation of an organization. The apex predators of organizations play important parts in shaping the meta-organization. They are responsible for bringing issues that the organization find important to the meta-organization’s ‘table’ and in the other direction: the implementation of meta-organization’s decision in the organization. Therefore, the apex predators’ roles are crucial for the functioning of the meta-organization. We find that these kind of ‘inner life’ issues of the meta-organization to a large extent has been ignored in the meta-organization literature and that it deserves further study.

The aim of this paper is to explore the apex predators in a local multi-stakeholder meta-organization working for sustainability, the Uppsala Climate Protocol. There are particularly three aspects that we are interested in: activities, loyalties and resources. Activity refers to bringing initiatives to the meta-organization from the member organization (lobbying) as well as the implementation of decisions made by the meta-organization in the member organization (adaption). When it comes to loyalties, there are four relevant loyalties of interest: the loyalty to purpose of the meta-organization, the loyalty to the secretariat of the meta-organization, the loyalty to the member organization’s purpose and the loyalty to a sustainable transition. Lastly, we focus on the positions that the representatives have in the member organizations and the resources that it comes with: are managers the apex predators or are experts apex predators?