Since its founding in 2018, the activation of business ecosystems with socio-environmental impact has permeated Conexsus' strategies. In particular, the mapping of the Conexsus Challenge, an initiative that guided the initial strategies and operations, aimed to generate an initial overview of the actors that make up these ecosystems from the perspective of community businesses, which named the most varied types of partnerships they relied on to make their activities viable.

The partnership networks highlighted in this first exercise were fundamental for the beginning of the implementation of Conexsus actions in the different territories. The regional partners played a fundamental role in the identification, mobilization and involvement of community businesses, in addition to actively participating in the co-creation and implementation of Conexsus initiatives. Likewise, several initiatives to address systemic bottlenecks in the development of community businesses were designed and implemented together with institutional partners or with a broader territorial scope.

However, in its early years, Conexsus' actions were more focused on generating in-depth understanding and developing solutions that, for the most part, addressed individual challenges of community businesses. However, as we gained more knowledge about the conditions and development trajectories of community businesses, from 2022 onwards, we sought to specifically capture the demands and needs for solutions that do not depend exclusively on the efforts within each organization.

When looking at experiences in other economic fields, it became clear that there was no way to think about the development of community businesses without simultaneously analyzing external elements, such as the availability and quality of services, resources, information, knowledge and shared solutions.

Despite a favorable moment of debate on regional development environments in the Amazon, we found that there had not yet been a consistent exercise on this topic that placed the demands and needs of community businesses at the center of attention. Thus, in 2022 we began a conceptual and methodological reflection aimed at enabling the design of ecosystems at a regional level, with the modeling of a process that begins with the identification and analysis of ecosystems by the community businesses themselves and, subsequently, successively involves other actors in the co-creation of solutions.

In 2023, the “Amazon Connections Initiative” allowed us to apply this approach in territories in the Amazon region where we already operated, generating a set of experiences and learnings that we share in this publication.

Conexsus thus seeks to contribute to debates and proposals that aim to build solutions for Activating Regional Community Business Ecosystems for the field of sociobioeconomy, articulating the demands and perspectives of the protagonists of these ecosystems engaged in the use and conservation of natural resources, with the mobilization of partners and key actors for the viability and resilience of businesses managed by rural and forest communities in the Amazon territories.

Monika Röper
Program Director at Conexsus