Résilience d'une méta‐organisation : Le cas d'un commun de l'alimentation

Meta-organization is a recent concept that draws attention of management academics. It allows to renew the private-public partnership approach. There is still little research on meta-organizations as contributing to sustainable development (Berkowitz and Bor, 2018) as well as to their resources, including mechanisms supporting resilience (Berkowitz, 2018). This paper focuses on the absorptive or resilience capacity of a meta-organization in the field of sustainable food. Food governance on territories has become a major issue over the past few years. The issue is recently taken in charge by collectives bringing together public and private partners, generally civil society, around food perceived as a common. The study is qualitative and based on the case of a local food policy council in France. Refering to resilience theory (Weick, 1993) and adopting a grounded theory methodology, we identify the characteristics of meta-organizational resilience. We then discuss the relationship between the resilience of a meta-organization and social transformation and contribute to the knowledge of policy-shaper meta-organizations. Finally, in this case we show how the social and solidarity economy (SSE) and the public authorities meet around a food common, making meta-organization an expression of institutional diversity in the deployment of the commons.