Meta-Organizations, Meta-Organizing and Grand Challenges (Part 1)

A growing literature on meta-organizations, organizations which members are themselves organizations, focuses on their roles in facilitating responsible and social innovation and in tackling grand challenges like climate change (Chaudhury et al. 2016), forest and land uses (Callagher et al 2022, Fernandes & lopes 2022) or marine biodiversity loss (Berkowitz & Grothe-Hammer 2022). Due to meta-organizations’ specific nature (Ahrne & Brunsson 2008), this form of collective action among organizations enabled governance and co-management activities and increases the legitimacy of self-regulation (Berkowitz et al. 2022). This might explain their importance in addressing grand challenges. Multi-stakeholder meta-organizations that are embedded in their territories may constitute a particularly powerful tool to solve complex socio-environmental issues (Berkowitz et al 2020). Yet, more needs to be understood about the forms and conditions under which meta-organizations and meta-organizing can successfully bring solutions to grand challenges and contribute to sustainability transitions in different countries or regions. We also still understand relatively little the broader institutional, spatial and historical conditions under which the development of such meta-organizations is more consistent with sustainability than other forms of collective action or instruments. In particular, we think it would be fruitful to analyse how meta-organizations may emerge and develop in all local, national, international settings and how they might address issues of inequality and justice in the face of grand challenges. This is the general objective of this session. We are interested in both theoretical and empirical studies that focus on meta-organizations, meta-organizing and all types of grand challenge.