MARIA EHRNSTRÖM-FUENTES LEGITIMACY IN THE PLURIVERSE: TOWARDS AN EXPANDED VIEW ON CORPORATE-COMMUNITY RELATIONS IN THE GLOBAL FORESTRY INDUSTRY consequences for governance and how the corporate world engages with local communities. Instead of promoting consensus-seeking stakeholder dialogues among those who do not wish to become stakeholders of the corporate world, there is a need to open up for encounters between worlds through conversations across differences and celebrate conflicts as manifestations of the different worlds within the pluriverse. Rooted governance is introduced as a concept that contrasts with the top-down approach of global governance. Instead, the bottom-up rooted approach recognises local differences, knowledges, and livelihoods as important elements of reproducing and sustaining life in communities. This pluriversal way of conceptualizing and acknowledging different life worlds and social imaginaries opens up opportunities to explore new alternatives for co-existence of communities – one of the most urgent challenges for our and future generations.
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MARIA EHRNSTRÖM-FUENTES – LEGITIMACY IN THE PLURIVERSE
This thesis critically analyses corporate-community relations in the forestry industry, with a particular focus on cases in the Latin American context. The key conceptual focus is on the legitimacy of corporate activity from the perspective of local communities in the contested field of sustainability. The concept of legitimacy is critically discussed in the light of a pluriversal approach to reality: Instead of assuming that legitimacy can be derived from a universally socially constructed system of shared norms and believes, legitimacy in the pluriverse signals that the world is not made up of one single history or worldview but many different ways of knowing, sensing, and being; what is perceived as legitimate depends on the place-based social imaginaries of the communities where it emerges. This approach to legitimacy creation, provides a nuanced understanding of the contested nature of forestry-community relations in Latin America. Adapting a pluriversal perspective on legitimacy has
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EKONOMI OCH SAMHÄLLE ECONOMICS AND SOCIETY
LEGITIMACY IN THE PLURIVERSE TOWARDS AN EXPANDED VIEW ON CORPORATECOMMUNITY RELATIONS IN THE GLOBAL FORESTRY INDUSTRY MARIA EHRNSTRÖM-FUENTES
Ekonomi och samhälle Economics and Society
Skrifter utgivna vid Svenska handelshögskolan Publications of the Hanken School of Economics
Nr 304
Maria Ehrnström-Fuentes
Legitimacy in the Pluriverse Towards an Expanded View on Corporate-Community Relations in the Global Forestry Industry
Helsinki 2016
