RRBM Dare to Care Dissertation Scholarships 2026 Winners

Addressing many of today’s grand challenges, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and unsustainable food systems, requires diverse actors to stay meaningfully engaged with shared problems over time. Yet the collaborative arrangements built to support such engagement often undermine it. As the burden of maintaining them grows and the scope of what they permit narrows, actors may remain formally involved while their interactions become less meaningful and less responsive to the underlying challenge. This presents a central organizational problem: how can actors sustain meaningful engagement with grand challenges over prolonged timespans?This project speaks to environmental, participatory, and intergenerational injustice. It asks whose concerns remain visible when collaboration drifts, whose burdens are taken seriously, and whose futures, including those of future generations, are represented. The findings are intended to benefit communities affected by transitions, as well as policymakers, movement organizers, and facilitators who shape them.

The dissertation comprises four papers drawing on three engaged qualitative studies in Dutch agrifood and climate settings: a temporary multistakeholder initiative, a regional community of practice, and a senior-led climate movement. Across these studies, it draws on 276 semi-structured interviews, 982 hours of participant observation, 327 open ended survey responses, and thousands of archival documents.

The dissertation contributes to organization theory by explaining how collaborative arrangements can, over time, decouple from the problems they are meant to address; how interaction rituals help actors self-sustain and shift engagement with grand challenges in contested settings; how connective labor holds cross-field communities of practice together; and how senior climate activists mobilize on behalf of future others rather than future selves.

For policy and practice, the findings yield facilitative, governance, and ritual repertoires, along with teaching cases that equip managers, facilitators, and civil society actors to design collaborative spaces that resist disengagement, keep attention anchored to underlying problems, and sustain long-term action on behalf of affected communities and future generations. In line with RRBM’s principles of service to society, valuing basic and applied contributions, and stakeholder involvement, the research is phenomenon-driven, theory-informed, methodologically plural, and developed in close dialogue with societal partners to produce knowledge that is useful.

Highly salient socio-political disruptions often compel organizations to respond with public commitments, resources, and advocacy. But these events are often momentary. As public attention shifts, conventional theory predicts loosely coupled responses that are eventually abandoned. Drawing on six years of archival data and two years of longitudinal interviews at Inspire Corporation (pseudonym), a large global firm, I examine the trajectories of 17 initiatives catalyzed by the 2020 social justice protests. Contrary to expectations, all 17 remained active in 2026, despite the waning external salience of social justice and even mounting backlash. I ask: how do organizational activities catalyzed by socio-political disruptions persist amid declining event salience and potential backlash?

I find that initiatives endured, in part, through recombination: social ideas elevated by the protests were progressively recombined with established organizational ideas, resulting in substantial social innovation across initiatives. The study extends theory on recombination by revealing it as a mechanism of preservation, not only of novelty, and contributes to social innovation scholarship by showing that socially motivated ideas persist not by remaining insulated but by recombining with a wide range of ideas from across an organization.

The findings inform managerial practice and organizational policy by identifying the micro and meso level actions through which event-catalyzed organizational activity is translated into durable organizational structures, routines, and governance mechanisms. Rather than assuming linear progress toward prosocial goals, this work highlights how organizations can innovate in ways that make them resilient to backlash and fluctuating socio-political attention. In doing so, the research contributes to conversations on how organizations can maintain continuous pressure on enduring social challenges.

This proposal engages several of the RRBM Research Principles, particularly those emphasizing collaboration and plurality. The research was conducted with input from a wide group of professional philanthropy, corporate social responsibility, and diversity professionals, who generously offered their expertise on project directions and indicated which lines of research inquiry would be most impactful. Additionally, the inductive nature of the project has allowed a wide range of perspectives to be considered and novel theorization to emerge from the data.