Strategic Responses to Grand Challenges: Why and How Corporations Build Community Resilience

Abstract

We explore why and how corporations seek to build community resilience as a strategic response to grand challenges. Based on a comparative case study analysis of four corporations strategically building community resilience in five place-based communities in South Africa, as well as three counterfactual cases, we develop a process model of corporate practices and contingent factors that explain why and how some corporations commit to community resilience building and whether they try to do so directly or indirectly. We thus help explain corporations’ strategic contributions to community resilience, and we emphasise the role of place-specific resources, social-ecological system viability, and limited statehood in motivating such organisational responses to grand challenges.