Mobilizing Landscapes of Practice to Address Grand Challenges

Grand challenges (GCs) require coordinated and integrated responses that draw on different occupational communities' competencies that might otherwise remain in isolation. We theorize how GCs can be tackled by mobilizing landscapes of practice (LoPs) - a totality of local communities that constitute a ‘living knowledge area’ within a given domain. The LoP concept helps to understand the deployment of participatory architectures, which in the current literature is considered essential for addressing GCs. To this end, LoPs emphasize the mutual accountability between networks and communities across informal and institutional settings and the need to learn about the LoP rather than focusing only on developing local competencies. Thus LoP mobilization is complex and requires collective practical judgment while facing the arising socio-political tensions. Drawing on a study in the Australian mental health care, we propose four pillars enabling the mobilization of LoPs, and constituting general guiding principles determining and legitimizing the LoP’s purpose, deploying LoP-based governance structures, motivating and connecting membership across the LoP, and demonstrating the value of the mobilized LoP. We propose a model of mobilizing LoPs that serves as a reference for network leaders and managerial practice while advancing the academic debates on GCs and situated learning.