3.6.4 Conclusions

The meta-synthesis carried out in this article demonstrated that the examined legal frameworks are conducive to stakeholder participation, i.e. they allow or require stakeholders to participate in the membership and governance of social enterprises. However, formal participatory governance was not fully implemented in practice in the examined case studies across the various jurisdictions. On the contrary, informal, direct but regular processes were developed to accommodate and solicit the stakeholders’ feedback, advice, and consultancy in the social enterprises’ governance and decision-making.

Accordingly, the formal participation of stakeholders in the social enterprises’ governance tended to be influenced by the decisions of the principal decision- makers rather than by the compliance to a legal framework, which predominantly allows but sometimes also requires or excludes the participation of stakeholders in the social enterprises’ membership and governance. In fact, when the formal participation of stakeholders was stipulated as a legal obligation, it tended to be implemented in practice because of compliance with law.

Other than the decisions of the principal decision-makers, crucial to the implementation of formal stakeholder participation was also the motivation of stakeholders to participate actually by exercising their legal rights. The factor of trust among these decision-makers and stakeholders, the level of maturity of the organisation, and the perceived governance challenges influenced both the decisions and motivations of the principal decision-makers and stakeholders.

The governance challenges finally resulted in governance structures which were limited mainly to formal stakeholder participation in the governance of the organisation. In contrast, the development of various kinds of informal and direct stakeholder participation mechanisms demonstrated that the examined social enterprises tended to cooperate actually with stakeholders on a regular basis. The stakeholder mechanisms were not provided in law, but they were internally developed in the organisational functioning of the examined social enterprises.