Learning for the commons: organizational and evaluation challenges

Purpose - This theoretical paper explores the learning challenges stemming from the need to protect and develop common resources (such as a landscape's beauty, an industrial district's reputation or a marine area's abundance of fish), and highlights the possible implications of these challenges for organizational and evaluation studies. Design/methodology/approach - A systematic analysis of carefully selected literature is conducted to assess the multi-disciplinary contributions of several research streams that, although separated so far, are highly complementary to provide a sound basis for understanding commons-relating learning dynamics. The literature streams considered for this study are: organizational fields, community studies, entrepreneurship studies, socio-technical transitions and adaptive co-management. Findings and originality/value -. The inter-disciplinary cross-fertilization conducted in this study allows the authors to build an original model that identifies three key learning processes intertwining at the field level and impacting the commons: community learning, entrepreneurial learning, and ecosystem learning. Practical implications - The novel view of field-level, commons-oriented learning processes proposed by this study has relevant implications for the management of several emerging organizational forms, such as value chain networks, place-based networks, policy networks, innovation ecologies, science & technology parks, smart cities & communities.