Sharing Economy Model for the Base of the Pyramid: An Ecosystem Approach

This chapter examines how an ecosystem approach can be applied to develop and sustain sharing activities and to scale the social impact of sharing economy models (SEMs). Using the literature and findings from a pilot study of Moving Feast, an emerging ecosystem among food-based social organizations in Victoria, Australia, we develop a relational ecosystem approach to sharing economy in which key actors (i.e., STREAT social enterprise) steer the process through informal arrangements to generate trust and reciprocity in the system. In this approach, bottom-up process of building an ecosystem relies on actors’ sharing orientation and sharing behavior to offer localized and context-specific solutions. These sharing orientation and behaviors are sustained as they become institutionalized and embedded in the ecosystem through both organizational and system-level processes and the development of sharing institutional logic. This relational ecosystem approach also resulted in initial signs of impact on both specific stakeholder and system level that would have been difficult to achieve through scaling individual organizations. Our study highlights the role of place-based, bottom-up processes in cultivating and sustaining sharing behavior.