Prins, Hugo (2025) Facilitating Regional Sustainability: The Role of Intermediary Organizations in Supporting Transitions Among Local Businesses. Master thesis, Sustainable Entrepreneurship (SE).
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Abstract
This research examines the role played by intermediary organizations in helping regional economic systems' small businesses to transition sustainability. The research focuses on the central question: ‘’How do intermediary organizations facilitate sustainable transitions among local businesses?’’ From the perspectives of different stakeholders, including intermediary professionals, small business owners, and public sector representatives, the research examines the role of intermediaries in sustainable activities, working through barriers, and shaping the broader institutional and cultural environment that enables transitions. While research on sustainability transitions has gained increasing attention over the last few years, a significant amount of the literature has focused on the macro scale of policy intervention or the business scale of innovation. There has been much less attention to the activities on a meso-scale of players, and even less to intermediaries that act at or below their region scale. Examples of this kind of organizations that act as intermediaries are innovation hubs and business networks, for instance by interpreting policies and facilitating their knowledge sharing. Relatively little has been written about what such organizations do to affect sustainable development within their local reach. The research adopts a qualitative research design based on multiple case studies and semi-structured interviews. By examining the strategies, barriers, and impacts of intermediary organizations, the research contributes to an extension of what is known in terms of intermediaries and their systemic change. The research is based on three sub-questions with each of them informing the research to investigate the intermediary strategies, barriers they have to face, and to what extent they contribute to regional sustainability. Empirical findings show that intermediaries play an important yet too context-sensitive role within the local sustainability process. Their performance depends upon specific local factors, including the regulatory framework, socio-economic conditions, and availability of reliable partnerships. Network and institutional support play an important but also context-dependent role during the processes of transition in the region. More precisely, institutional support refers not only to the consistency of policy, but also to long-term funding mechanisms, and public authority legitimacy. Network density involves the presence of extensive and active stakeholders, where frequent and meaningful interactions develop mutual understanding and shared goals. Institutional support, network density, and compatibility among intermediaries and local businesses must be established for the purpose of affecting the intermediary’s performance. Compatibility refers to the coherence among the intermediary services and the businesses’ needs, capacities, and goals for achieving sustainability as well as cultural and operational compatibility. Without the above conditions, the potential of intermediaries to affect systemic change is significantly reduced. The research contributes to a theory about intermediaries and what their role is within sustainability transitions as well as highlighting the implications for policies to be able to better leverage intermediaries within the local development policy.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Master) |
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| Name supervisor: | Kilian, S.K. and Zwitter, A.J. |
| Date Deposited: | 16 Jul 2025 09:34 |
| Last Modified: | 16 Jul 2025 09:34 |
| URI: | https://campus-fryslan.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/704 |
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