Scaling-Across, Not Scaling Alike: How Environmental Community Enterprises Replicate Differently Across Regions

Abstract

Community enterprises are often deeply embedded in local contexts, making it difficult for them to scale beyond their original setting. Recent literature suggests this challenge may also arise from intra-logic variation—differences in how “community” is defined and enacted across places. This paper builds on that insight by examining the local emergence of three types of environmental community enterprises—renewable energy cooperatives, food forests, and repair cafés—in the Netherlands. It analyzes how social, environmental, knowledge, and institutional dimensions of the community logic shape their spatial distribution. Using quantitative modeling, the study finds that each enterprise type is driven by different local conditions: social capital for RE co-ops, ecological awareness for food forests, and educational infrastructure for repair cafés. The study contributes to institutional logics theory and social enterprise literature by showing that “scaling across” varies meaningfully by type and place.