Transforming Relationships and Empowering Communities: The Role of Care Ethics in Solving Grand Challenges

We examine how actors who have no legislative authority over others are able to transform water management from a fragmented approach to a coordinated regional approach, by drawing on a longitudinal study of a regional water board in British Columbia, Canada. We found that the water board enacted an ethic of care to initiate and implement change to achieve water sustainability. Three caring processes operated in the initiating change period: leveraging a caring water ethic to amplify urgency, constructing care narratives to reduce resistance, and embedding care in organizational structures to demonstrate authenticity. Two caring processes operated in the implementing change period: enacting an ethic of care to transform relationships and valorizing a caring water ethic. We found that care within the social world (e.g., caring for others both in a community and in neighboring communities) led to better care for the biosphere world (e.g., water). This study contributes to the emerging organization scholarship on the ethics of care by examining the process through which care is enacted inside and outside (e.g., between interdependent actors) the organization and the consequences of the enactment of care (e.g., beyond the organization, field-level effects). We reorient care in organization scholarship not only as a response to suffering as commonly portrayed in extant literature, but also as a source of agency. From this, we discuss the potential of care ethics for finding innovative solutions to environmental sustainability, and grand challenges in general.