Abstract
We examine how poverty-alleviation ecosystems are built, and sustained through distributed leadership practices rather than through centralized governance or individual agency. Drawing on a six-year qualitative study of Hong Kong's Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Fund (SIEF), we reconceptualize ecosystems as ongoing leadership accomplishments enacted through recurrent activities of convening, deliberating, brokering, evaluating, and reporting as a practice. We make two interrelated theoretical contributions. First, we reframe poverty-alleviation ecosystems as leadership-in-practice (LAP), demonstrating that ecosystem coherence emerges through distributed, collective practices rather than predetermined structures. Building on Raelin's LAP perspective, we shift the unit of analysis from ecosystem structure to ecosystem enactment, showing how leadership is accomplished through mundane, recurrent practices across multiple sites and actors. Second, we reconceptualise legitimacy, shared value, knowledge creation, and collective identity—traditionally treated as antecedent conditions or structural features—as practice-based boundary accomplishments. Drawing on Schatzki's practice theory, we show these are continuously produced and reproduced through situated interactions, providing a processual account of how boundaries are negotiated, stabilised, and occasionally disrupted. Our integrative contribution positions LAP as a powerful theoretical lens for understanding how ecosystems addressing grand challenges are collectively enacted over time, bridging macro-level ecosystem theorizing with micro-level leadership dynamics through a relational, processual account of collective action.