Boundary Organizations in Practice: Neighborhood-scale Organic Waste Management in Linden Hills, Minneapolis

Abstract

Boundary organizations play an increasingly important role in bridging the divide between science and politics or more broadly in processes of developing shared meaning among different stakeholders. In contexts where a variety of actors with different types of knowledge converge to promote collective outcomes, boundary organizations have played an important role in transfer, translation and transformation of knowledge. Through the example of a composting pilot program in the neighborhood of Linden Hills in Minneapolis, this paper aims to provide conceptual insights into the design of boundary organizations, arguing that a knowledge-management perspective offers a potentially powerful tool for design. While the value of such organizations in generative processes of bridging gaps between different actors is well established, there is little guidance in the literature on the design of boundary organizations in practice, or what information and framework might be useful while constituting them. Through the example of the Linden Hills program, it is argued that identifying the exact nature of information - the type of knowledge exchange (syntactic, semantic or pragmatic), and their nesting, is key to framework elements such as the design of the boundary organization and appropriate boundary objects. The paper aims to make a theoretical contribution to the literature on boundary organizations as well, by exploring how the relative proximity of a boundary organization to one or more actors influences the structure of boundaries themselves. And secondly, that distinguishing between functional activities that organizations perform, such as negotiation, advocacy, mediation, community building and so on from the ontological basis for instituting boundary organizations as knowledge management entities can provide conceptual clarity for the purposes of practical design.