Coordinating In Digital Sustainability: Collective Action Across Systemic Differences

An accelerating planetary crisis demands transformation toward sustainability through countless distinct changes taking place in different places at the same time. While research on digital sustainability shows how digital resources can support measurement, product innovation, and scaling, less is known about how to coordinate sustainability efforts among actors who are differently positioned. In this paper, we advance a collective action perspective to examine how digital resources can enable sustainability transformation across niche, regime, and landscape positions in the European agri-food industry. Based on a five-year interpretive field study, we analyze three empirical instances in which digital resources became central to coordinating sustainability efforts. We show that digital resources such as formulation engines, certification metrics, and traceability platforms support differentiated yet coherent enactments of sustainability by making heterogeneous contributions sufficiently compatible without requiring convergence. In doing so, we frame digital sustainability as a problem of collective action and show how coordination becomes possible under conditions where actors differ in how they act, how they evaluate sustainability, and how they relate to time.