ORCHESTRATING COLLECTIVE ACTION FOR GRAND CHALLENGES: A MULTI-LEVEL STUDY OF RELATIONSHIPS, ARCHITECTURES, AND NETWORKS.

This thesis explores how organizations addressing grand challenges operate in inter-organizational contexts, where independent, cross-sectoral actors must coordinate to pursue innovative responses to pressing societal problems. In these settings, policymakers, corporations, non-governmental organizations, and associations are required to design and sustain collaborative networks to align efforts and mobilize resources toward collective goals. In such contexts, orchestration becomes crucial in facilitating coordination by aligning activities and establishing governance arrangements. Despite growing interest in GCs, our understanding of how orchestration enables coordination for collective action across multiple levels remains limited. Drawing on an in-depth multi-level case study of the LIFE Bear-Smart Corridors (BSC) initiative, an environmental safeguarding project in Central Italy, this thesis examines how coordination unfolds across interpersonal, organization al, and network levels, transforming individual intentions into collective outcomes. This thesis comprises three interconnected qualitative studies, grounded in rich, multi-source data, including ethnographic observations, interviews, and documentary materials. The first paper explores coordination at the interpersonal level, emphasizing how micro-level interactions support knowledge sharing and foster learning within distributed collaborative activities, thereby offering new insights into the knowledge-sharing literature in dynamic, multi-actor environments. The second paper focuses on the organizational level, examining how a lead organization manages internal structures, including technical, organizational, and physìcal dìmensions, to coordinate and align both internal and external actors. It highlights the role of an integrated, multidimensional, and collaborative approach for enabling effective data-driven solutions. The third paper examines coordination at the network level, focusing on how orchestration practices shape and sustain multi-actor networks over time. It demonstrates how bottom-up, participatory governance enhances the capabilities of inter-organizational networks to address increasingly complex societal challenges where conventional coordination approaches fall short. Overall, the thesis advances our understanding of how orchestration across multiple organizational levels enables coordination and collective action, providing insights for both scholars and practitioners involved in complex grand challenge settin