Adaptive Governance for Strategic Agility: Explaining Organizational Responses to Persistent Environmental Turbulence
Keywords:
adaptive governance, strategic agility, persistent environmental turbulence, dynamic capabilities, organizational coordination, middle-range theoryAbstract
Organizations increasingly operate under conditions of persistent environmental turbulence characterized by continuous technological disruption, geopolitical uncertainty, institutional change, and shifting competitive dynamics. Although strategic agility has become essential for organizational adaptation, existing research predominantly explains it through capability-based perspectives, providing limited insight into how organizations coordinate adaptive action under sustained uncertainty. This conceptual paper addresses this theoretical gap by proposing a middle-range theory that positions adaptive governance as the central organizational mechanism linking persistent environmental turbulence to strategic agility. Integrating Adaptive Governance Theory with Dynamic Capabilities Theory, the paper argues that governance architectures characterized by distributed decision authority, continuous organizational learning, adaptive coordination, and iterative feedback enable organizations to transform environmental uncertainty into timely strategic responses. Unlike existing capability-centered explanations, the proposed framework conceptualizes governance as an active coordination mechanism rather than a contextual condition. The study contributes by extending strategic agility research beyond capability-based explanations, broadening the application of Adaptive Governance Theory to strategic management, and developing a theoretically bounded framework that explains how governance mechanisms generate strategic agility under persistent environmental turbulence.
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