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The survivorship of firms under extreme weather poses an essential question about the local economy's health. Over 90% of agricultural banks are categorized as community banks, which are important financial institutions promoting local growth. While previous studies suggest that climate change and weather shocks adversely impact community banks' resiliency, studies on whether these institutions engage in risk-reducing management strategies have been limited. In this study, the authors examine strategic choices of local community banks when facing flood events which include (1) safety net increase, (2) portfolio diversification, and (3) branch opening. These strategic choices are the coping mechanisms banks can take to survive while affecting the local competitive lending market.

The authors use panel-fixed effect regressions based on the storm data from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s National Weather Service (NWS) and the call reports from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The authors focus on community banks' account variable characteristics and the number of offices to examine whether community banks take an active role in managing flood risk.

Results suggest that community banks do employ the selected strategic choices to a certain degree, as it is found that there is an increase in the core capital that absorbs shocks and portfolio diversification. However, the magnitudes of these activities are rather small and not large enough to fully mitigate the climate risk. Also, the authors do not find any evidence of branch expansion associated with local floods.

This study contributes to the literature by examining different strategic choices of community banks in the face of natural uncertainty. Even though concerns of climate risk have been raised in the regulatory setting, a lack of guidance or assessment tools could contribute to the passive action of these community banks, even though climate risks can have a significant economic impact. Thus, the evidence documented from this study calls for further guidelines and the importance of highlighting climate risks on community banks so that they can actively engage in risk-reducing strategies.

This study aims to illustrate how collaborative platforms may leverage active community for climate change adaptation to implement biodiversity preservation policies.

This study adopts the Dynamic Performance Governance methodological framework to analyze the causal relationships affecting biodiversity preservation policy outcomes.

Active community reduces harmful factors for biodiversity (i.e. biological threats and anthropogenic pressure), limiting the risk of extinction of perennial plants. Stakeholders’ prior knowledge is an enabling condition of climate adaptation processes as it triggers the adoption of prescriptions and cultural changes in a community.

The study provides methodological guidance to define measures to deliver material information to support environmental performance governance. It elaborates an inventory of short- and long-term performance indicators integrating natural-science targets into accounting measures that can support policymakers operating in other contexts to implement climate change adaptation policies.

As a response to the study findings, social implications provide insights into how active community in collaborative platforms for climate change may support stakeholders to address natural resources imbalances, define strategies to share the burden among them and intervene on multiple policy domains (e.g. financial, environmental and social).

Climate change adaptation challenges are conceptualized as “super wicked problems,” and the collaborative platforms designed to address them are rendered as complex adaptive systems. This makes the paper go beyond traditional environmental governance, demonstrating that stakeholders’ interactions within collaborative platforms harness active community specialized knowledge.

This study aims to ascertain the forms of social enterprises created for public services and the dimensions of community-based management of public facilities. It seeks to understand how community-based facilities management (CbFM) can apply to the management of public services created by social enterprises in developing communities.

The study examines research studies on CbFM through a scoping review of papers published between 1997 and 2022.

The scoping review revealed that there are five dimensions of CbFM for developing communities: CbFM, urban facilities management, sustainable CbFM, urban infrastructure management and management of community hubs. It also revealed that social enterprises have been used to manage services, and for social inclusion, and to increase the efficiency of tangible infrastructure in communities.

The scoping review included literature from 1997 to 2022 to understand the development trends in CbFM in developing communities. It is possible that literature from a broader timeframe could have produced more in-depth understanding of the subject investigated.

The paper articulates a framework of CbFM models for public services in developing communities and developed a database of the relevant studies, which can further guide future researchers, stakeholders and policymakers in this area.

The comprehensive review produced a framework for community management of public services. It also identified that there is a paucity of literature on social infrastructure. It highlighted the need for skillsets to support community-based enterprises. There are limited studies that touch on the development of performance indicators for developing communities.

This paper aims to study historical intercultural transfer by examining the case of the Mouvement Desjardins, a Quebec, Canada-based cooperative bank founded in 1900 by Alphonse Desjardins. The aim of the cooperative was to support the hitherto marginalized French–Canadian population and to initiate their economic and entrepreneurial activities.

The authors focus on a historical single-case analysis. This conducts them to analyse primary data from letters exchanged between Alphonse Desjardins and European actors, as well as company documents of the Groupe Desjardins.

The intercultural transfer of the cooperative bank model and its implementation in North America as a successful, self-sustaining model is owing to recontextualization and strategic decisions of the social entrepreneur Alphonse Desjardins based on intensive written correspondence with European bank directors who promoted the cooperative system.

This research instigates an impulse to extend our knowledge of intercultural transfer by looking into other historical cases to provide validation or add subtleties to our understanding of intercultural transfer dynamics.

This paper expands the current understanding of intercultural transfer and its powerful influence, namely, how an implemented cooperative bank system can contribute through successful recontextualization to institutional change and societal improvements. It also provides new insights into the creation and growth of social enterprises based on shared values within communities and coordinated strategic intentions across communities.

This study aims to explore the benefits of strategy as way-finding approach to strategic thinking suggested by Robert Chia for small community-based Southern NGOs. The purpose is to find alternatives to the strategic planning (SP) approach.

The study adopts the perspective of phronesis (Flyvbjerg, 2006) using the case study of a 45-year-old NGO based in India and working for community development. The data has been collected for over more than 20 years. Qualitative analysis of the data has been done by focusing on the activities that were performed in keeping with the requirements of phronetic research.

The study finds that through way-finding approach to strategic thinking, a Southern NGO is able to manage and reduce its resource dependence while maintaining organizational autonomy and pursuing its vision. The approach avoids the pathologies produced through SP in such organisations.

This study adds to empirical contexts in which strategy as way-finding may be practiced. This study explicitly shows how this may be very useful to smaller community-based Southern NGOs. This study also adds to the research on strategy as practice by showing its relevance in the NGO sector.

This study shows alternatives to NGOs that are reluctant to engage in SP. This study also shows how NGOs can benefit from the way-finding approach to strategic thinking to improve their community connect, autonomy and impact.

This study provides alternatives to resisting the power asymmetry of the global North-South development agenda.

This study demonstrates the usefulness of the way-finding approach to strategy in the context of smaller Third-World NGOs and provides alternatives to SP.

The current study aims to map the existent modes of engagement used by both individual and organisational actors of Romanian diaspora community in the UK to build public legitimacy and social value in the host society. This study focuses on two main questions: (1) What are the forms of engagement by which diaspora members enact their role as diplomats for ethnic diaspora communities? (2) What is the nature of their communication practices that sustain these forms of diasporic engagement?

This study is based on an analysis of online public documents extracted from different websites, blogs and public social media accounts, complemented by primary data. The research design is a multi-levelled case study.

The main findings are that Romanian diaspora in the UK develops a specific model of diplomacy, focused on cultural and political forms of engagement. Firstly, equality and belonging are two key dimensions that clearly define this diasporic community diplomatic actions and practices. Secondly, the communication that fosters its networked and associative features has shifted towards a more democratic and strategic model.

This paper has multiple original points. Firstly, it deepens the understanding of diaspora diplomacy, connecting the concept with strategic communication. Secondly, the identification and theorisation of specific forms of engagement of diasporic communities reflects a process which is yet underdeveloped in both types of literature. Findings may be instrumental in providing strategies for relationship building, cultivation and the engagement efforts of the UK institutions regarding immigrant integration.

With gaining popularity, online communities are increasing. It is leading to the data and information overflow. So, there are some challenges like cyber frauds, cyberbullying, etc. while engaging with online communities. Not only this, anonymity of the participants, stress and racism are also big challenges in online communities' interaction. Online harassers' attack tactics have changed over time. In addition, there are challenges like quality of discussion, inequality in participation of the users, etc. may scale online communities towards incitement and activism. Therefore, this study will try to analyse these challenges for overall benefit of the society.

The underlying fuzzy set theory is employed to handle the fuzziness of users' perceptions since the attributes are expressed in linguistic preferences. Through exhaustive literature review, the authors have identified 15 challenges. These challenges are further categorised as cause and effect by using DEMATEL (Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) approach.

Lack of strategic planning and uninspired discussions between users has emerged as a major challenge in cause category. This study further demonstrates how individual challenge can be managed and developed to navigate the online communities to maintain a healthy environment in society.

Results are based on limited dataset. Therefore, findings cannot be generalised for all online communities.

The research findings offer a suitable direction to policymakers to formulate and design policies, laws and regulations to increase user engagement in the online community. The study is beneficial to firms and researchers in understanding the factors influencing effective management of online communities.

Safety and security (S&S) are critical concerns in South Africa, especially in Cape Town, one of the country’s most crime-ridden cities. The University of Cape Town (UCT), situated on a large, open campus, has experienced increased malefaction. Facilities management (FM) services at universities bear the primary responsibility for providing S&S to their communities. To comprehensively understand and address the community’s demands regarding S&S, the current study was conducted to investigate the challenges specific to open universities. This study aims to determine whether implementing community-based FM (CbFM) principles and using technological innovations could offer a more effective and sustainable solution.

The study adopted interpretivist overarching case study methodology, which is ontologically based. A mixed-method approach was used to incorporate the strengths and limitations of the weaknesses of both methods. The data collection took the form of an online survey of the university community and semi-structured interviews with university executive management to obtain data from the single case study of UCT. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the quantitative data, and thematic analysis was used to identify emergent themes from the qualitative data.

The study presents an overall view of the provision of S&S at UCT, the unique challenges faced by management and the main S&S issues affecting the community. Moreover, the study reveals that UCT has implemented community participation processes in the past with limited success. This is because the strategies implemented constitute a narrow perspective of community participation. Therefore, a much smarter and more inclusive perspective using technological innovation is required for successful community participation to occur and to be successfully used in providing S&S toward achieving future-proofing facilities.

This research has demonstrated the influence of CbFM and innovative technologies on the S&S of the open campus. Hence, future-proof facilities can be achieved when FM actively engages university communities in managing campuses through technological innovation.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) must take on a leadership role in building a sustainable world, given their responsibility for preparing future professionals and leaders worldwide and considering the role they provide to society. To accomplish this goal, HEIs need to holistically embody sustainability in everything they develop. This study aims to help HEIs in this purpose by developing a method to integrate sustainability into the strategic planning process in these institutions.

In the first stage, the method was developed based on papers selected through a systematic literature review. The proposed method was then applied in a Brazilian HEI to validate and adjust it.

A method that adopts a participatory process to integrate sustainability into HEIs’ strategic planning was proposed.

This study provides university leaders with a simple and practical method to aid with elaborating on strategic plans for holistic sustainability integration.

This study uniquely applied a framework called “HEIs sustainability action archetypes” as the foundation for selecting sustainable objectives, goals and actions to be integrated into these institutions’ strategic planning.