Regenerative Supply Chains: A Knowledge Polycentrism View

Abstract

The field of regenerative supply chains investigates how companies collaboratively preserve, restore and enhance the social and natural capital from which they procure. However, this field has still not addressed a fundamental question: How do supply chain managers organize the complex knowledge that underpins regeneration? The authors advance a prescriptive theory of knowledge polycentrism—the institutionalized process of integrating, sharing and using knowledge among members of a local ecosystem—for regenerative supply chains. The theory envisions how managers and their stakeholders should govern interdependent, fragmented and contested knowledge inherent in social‐ecological regeneration. The illustrative example of regenerative agriculture shows how to structure polycentrism to deal with knowledge complexity. In regenerative agricultural supply chains, the theory prescribes knowledge polycentrism as the following four interconnected knowledge governance nodes: industry‐wide, transdisciplinary, agroecological, and food policy. Despite the establishment of value distribution, incentive, monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, supply chain managers will probably face legal, socio‐political, and organizational tensions when structuring knowledge polycentrism. This prescriptive theory offers interdisciplinary implications to advance the study and practice of building knowledge commons for local regeneration.