Sustainability scholars have traditionally focussed on global and national governance spheres, but the increase of “localism” means that subnational governments and local governance—including local businesses—are also becoming an integral part of these systems. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of a rural county in the South-West of England, we examine how the concept of place impacts local sustainability governance. We contribute by: (1) demonstrating how local sustainability governance is part of broader multilevel governance systems, in which governance divisions happens along place-based lines rather than public-private spheres; (2) theorising how local sustainability governance is different because of its “local pragmatist” approach, emphasizing problem-solving, deliberation, creative action, and experimentation between local businesses, governments and civil society; and (3) explaining how local sustainability governance can alters the initial ‘sense of place’ through collective place-forming, bridging insights from geography studies. Our contributions help to complete the picture of sustainability governance and sketches an alternative, place-based governance system to enhance the resilience of societies and economies in the face of sustainability challenges.

This paper examines the effects of environmental transparency and enforcement regulation on the sourcing patterns of commodity trading firms (i.e., firms that source commodities from producers and distribute them downstream). By exploiting Brazil's priority regulation targeting producers in deforestation-intense municipalities, I find trading firms do not reallocate their sourcing from regulated to unregulated locations. However, treated trading firms reduce their exposure to deforestation and CO2 emissions associated with their sourcing in both regulated and unregulated locations relative to control firms. Although the effect in regulated locations could reflect the first-order responses by producers, the positive spillover effect in unregulated locations suggests trading firms respond to upstream production shocks and enhance the sustainability of their firm-wide sourcing activities. Importantly, (i) local enforcement actions and (ii) voluntary commitments to zero-deforestation sourcing and third-party audits appear to be crucial factors in altering trading firms' behavior and thereby enhancing the sustainability of commodity sourcing.

Organizations addressing grand challenges at scale must intervene in a way that is sensitive to institutionally diverse contexts to effect enduring change. How do they develop capabilities to conduct enduring place-based intervention work repeatedly across contexts and over time? The organization we studied addressed poverty via inclusive finance in lower and middle income countries, developing four interrelated capabilities for scaling place-based intervention work: contextualizing, field building, practice embedding and norm changing. Examining its 50-year trajectory, we identified a capability development process, involving reflective learning and knowledge circulation leading to capability scope and locus expansion over time, which led to expanded intervention work. Our findings on place-based intervention work contribute theoretically and practically to addressing grand challenges and introduce a new line of research on capabilities for institutional work, building a process model of their development and expansion over time.