Saeed Rahman, Nhan Thanh Nguyen, Natalie Slawinski

Regenerating Place: Highlighting the Role of Ecological Knowledge

  • Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management
  • General Environmental Science

As many local places globally suffer from ecological and social decline, sustainability research increasingly recognizes the critical importance of studying organizational efforts toward regenerating local communities and ecosystems. This emerging research, however, overlooks the role of ecological knowledge, that is, place-based understanding of the processes and functions of the ecosystems in which organizations operate. As such, we ask “How do organizations harness ecological knowledge to advance the regeneration of local places?” Through an inductive study of nine certified organic farming organizations on Vancouver Island, Canada, we find that organizations engage in three cyclical and closely interlinked practices of identifying, acquiring, and applying ecological knowledge which together enhance their organizational performance while contributing to regenerating the local social-ecological systems. Our empirically grounded model of leveraging ecological knowledge contributes to research on sustainability and place, and to studies of regeneration, by uncovering the specific practices that enable firms to develop place-based regenerative solutions.

Need a simple solution for managing your BibTeX entries? Explore CiteDrive!

  • Web-based, modern reference management
  • Collaborate and share with fellow researchers
  • Integration with Overleaf
  • Comprehensive BibTeX/BibLaTeX support
  • Save articles and websites directly from your browser
  • Search for new articles from a database of tens of millions of references
Try out CiteDrive

More from our Archive