Orchestrating Regeneration: How Temporality and Spatiality Shape Regenerative Strategies for Biodiversity

Companies are increasingly called to move beyond mitigating their environmental impacts and adopt regenerative approaches that enhance the health of socio-ecological systems. However, little is known about how such ambitions are translated into corporate strategy. A growing literature underscores the role of spatiotemporal scales in business strategies, particularly within the context of sustainability. This study investigates how companies interpret and combine spatial and temporal dimensions in developing regenerative strategies for biodiversity (RSB). The study adopts a qualitative research design by examining seven multinational companies embracing a regenerative business model in biodiversity-salient sectors. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews with key managers, complemented with corporate and archival documents, and analysed abductively using the Gioia methodology. The analysis reveals three distinct yet coexisting organizing logics through which companies develop RSB: Dependency Management, Stewardship & Advocacy, and Trust-Building. Each logic rests on a distinct coupling of temporal and spatial orientations, in which objective and processual interpretations of time, and objective and relational interpretations of space, intertwine in different ways. Companies combine these logics, highlighting that the formation of regenerative strategies is an adaptive configuration of interrelated practices enacted across heterogeneous temporal and spatial scales. The study contributes to research on RSB by advancing that strategy formation is a plural and dynamic process, and that regenerative strategizing entails the coexistence and interplay of multiple logics, each underpinned by different spatiotemporal orientations.