Temporary Organizing with Nature: How Companies Frame ‘Nature’ Through Pilot Projects

If companies are to contribute to solving the climate and nature crisis, they must rethink their relationship with nature. However, companies’ operations and supply chains are designed to shield themselves from or control nature, making it challenging to explore alternatives. Our study investigates three cases in different industries where companies used pilot projects to experiment with alternative ways of organizing their relationship with nature: regenerative practices in dairy farming, artificial reefs in offshore wind energy, and circular plastic waste solutions in healthcare. Inspired by Callon, we show how each pilot project framed ‘nature’ differently through the choice of non-human actors involved (e.g., plants, animals, materials). This framing proved incomplete, leading to overflows. These overflows differed depending on the organization’s relationship with nature, opening different pathways towards scaling. Our study contributes to understanding the ecological embeddedness of temporary organizing and the role of pilot projects in pursuing nature-related sustainability goals.