Introduction to the Special Issue "Emplaced partnerships and the ethics of care, recognition and resilience"

We began this special issue (SI) with the provocative aim ‘to put partnerships in their place’. Our intention was to create a forum where scholars from the domains of cross-sector partnerships (CSPs), place, and business ethics could combine their interests, advance novel theoretical and empirical insights, and reimagine a research agenda that explores CSPs from a place-based perspective. The aim of the SI is to bring to the fore the places in which CSPs are formed; how place shapes the dynamics of CSPs, and how CSPs shape the specific settings in which they develop. The papers of this issue collectively succeed in putting partnerships in their place by revealing the work involved in achieving this emplacement, each presenting a vivid illustration of how CSPs engage morally and materially with place, ranging from land to water, organized to wild spaces, and villages to transnational communities. The special issue offers new contributions to explaining how place enables and constrains organizing (Cartel et al., 2022; Lawrence, 2017), and it demonstrates that engaging with grand challenges such as climate change (Bowen et al., 2018) can enrich CSP theory in settings with entrenched inequality (Powell et al., 2018) and fragility (Welter et al., 2018). At a societal level, our SI connects critical sustainable development goals (SDGs), especially SDGs 3 (Good Health and Well-being), 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), 14 (Life below Water), 15 (Life on Land), and 17 (Partnerships). It also provides actionable insights into how firms address grand challenges in different contexts and at different scales (Chatterjee et al., 2022)