Anchoring the Maritime Ecosystem: Governance Challenges Within Complex Multi-Stakeholder Ecosystems

The reduction of carbon emissions is a pressing business and societal challenge demanding collective action across value chains. This study explores how collaborative ecosystem frameworks can address structural barriers for the green transition in industries where its organizations have distinct incentives to reduce emissions. We investigate barriers and enablers and how to overcome governance challenges in ecosystems lacking centralized leadership to orchestrate such transition. Using the maritime industry as an exemplary case, we conduct in-depth interviews, engage in discussion rounds, and participate in panel debates with maritime stakeholders to shed light into our research questions. Our findings reveal four transformative enablers to enact the green transition, namely communication and signaling, policies and regulations, trust-building mechanisms, and alignment of dual business aims. Moreover, our research points to two key actors in the ecosystem, objective non-governmental convener, and digital change agent. The former emerge through a (new) player at the heart of the ecosystem configuration to moderate governance among players. The digital change agent, in turn, supports knowledge sharing across the whole value chain. By integrating concepts of polycentric governance theory, we extend ecosystem research by emphasizing the need for distributed governance across ecosystem participants to achieve a common goal.