Conflicting institutional logics as a safe space for collaboration: action research in a reforestation NGO

This chapter narrates the experience of the two authors in developing a two-year long informal collaboration between their non-profit, mission-driven start-up and a large incumbent Asian Bank. Against the context of climate change, both organizations developed an alliance to advance nature-based solutions, specifically mangrove reforestation, in South-East Asia. Despite lasting over two years, this collaboration remained highly informal and was anchored in the personal resources of both companies' protagonists and their willingness and ability to deploy personal resources to advance collaborative goals. We find that radically opposing logics can create a safe space for explorative collaboration. At the same time, we also found that the difficulty of deploying organizational resources in the partnership, which arguably is rooted in the companies' radically diverging logics, eventually made it impossible for the non-contractual relationship to continue. We introduce and discuss five activities, anchored in personal resources, in which the protagonists engaged to advance the collaboration. However, eventually the radically diverging logics became too much of an obstacle once the institutional environment shifted. Perhaps surprisingly, once the government and other incumbents had bought into the ideas developed by the partners, the partnership itself became obsolete.