Community-based Enterprises: The Significance of Horizontal and Vertical Institutional Linkages

"Commons institutions evolve all the time, responding to social and economic needs and environmental constraints. Historically, the main drivers have been local needs and constraints. But in recent decades, the use of local commons has been increasingly responding to national and global economic opportunities. Such cases are of interest to commons researchers because they make it possible to investigate how local institutions can develop linkages, networks, relations, new skills, and new knowledge. A promising set of cases comes from the UNDP Equator Initiative. This is a program that holds biennial searches to find and reward entrepreneurship cases that seek to reduce poverty and conserve biodiversity at the same time. The short-listed cases are largely those that have been able to respond to national and global opportunities. What can we learn from these local entrepreneurship cases that seem to be playing successfully at the global level? "Here we focus on partnerships, networks, and specifically on horizontal linkages (across the same level of organization) and vertical linkages (across levels of organization) in a sample of ten UNDP EI projects. We find that successful projects typically interacted with a large array of supportive agencies and partners, around 10 to 15 partners in the cases in our sample. Based on information from on-site research, these partners included local and national NGOs; local, regional and (less commonly) national governments; international donor agencies and other organizations; and universities and research centers. These partners interacted with the local community to provide a range of services and support functions, including raising start-up funds; institution building; business networking and marketing; innovation and knowledge transfer; technical training; research; legal support; infrastructure; and community health and social services. These findings indicate that a diverse variety of partners are needed to help satisfy a diversity of needs, and highlight the importance of networks and support groups in the expanding use of commons."