Waterway health in a sunburnt country: A dive into the process of responding to a grand challenge

Abstract

This thesis explores the consequentiality of practices and processes carried out by actors as they attempt to tackle grand challenges. Recent calls for more actionable research on these issues have led scholars to investigate the processes through which organizations make sense of and articulate responses to grand challenges, the relative success these responses generate, and the ways in which we can empirically capture these processes. Despite these insights, few studies have looked at the role of prevalent social mechanisms, such as commensuration and legitimation, in shaping the ways responses to grand challenges are articulated, evolve over time, and affect change. We also lack strategies for studying the consequentiality of such processes. Informed by a qualitative case study of a multi-stakeholder partnership, that was formed to tackle waterway health degradation in a critical water basin discharging its waters into the Great Barrier Reef, I address each of these puzzles in three articles. First, I investigate the link between actions aimed at responding to a grand challenge and their outcomes. I propose three linking strategies that can help scholars (re)accord actions, responses, and outcomes when investigating organizations’ efforts to address grand challenges. In the second article, I focus on the role legitimacy plays in shaping actors’ ability to tackle a grand challenge. I offer a process model of (de)legitimating a response to a grand challenge highlighting the double-edged nature of legitimacy. In the third article, I open the commensuration ‘black box’ by revealing the dynamics behind commensuration practices and theorize on the reasons why commensuration can enable the inclusion of multiple evaluative principles while also hinder progress by generating unproductive ambiguity. Together, these three articles contribute to our theorizing of the consequentiality of practices and processes constituting the tackling of grand challenges.