Innovations addressing societal and environmental challenges often emerge within sustainable ecosystems, where diverse actors coordinate their efforts. We argue that the emergence of such ecosystems requires a protected space—one that must be cocreated by both public and private actors. This paper explores how these actors collaboratively establish and sustain protected spaces to enable the emergence of sustainable ecosystems. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of two case studies, we examine how public and private leaders share leadership and cocreate these protective environments. Our findings reveal the mechanisms through which shared leadership is established and public and private leaders mutually empower one another to perform leadership functions. We propose a framework that explains how shared leadership can be structured to support the creation of protected spaces that are conducive to sustainable ecosystems. Furthermore, we show that the involvement of public actors in ecosystem leadership transforms the ecosystem into a political object, introducing new vulnerabilities. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of shared ecosystem leadership for both public and private leaders.

This study examines the relationship between political orientation and support of onshore wind energy, using demographically representative surveys of the population in France. Our micro-econometric analysis focuses on individuals with left- or right-wing populist views and highlights the importance of accounting for trust in government when estimating this relationship. Support for onshore wind energy tends to be lower on the right side of the political spectrum—especially on the far right—than on the left and center. The difference in support between voters of populist and traditional parties (on either side of the political spectrum) becomes more pronounced when trust in government is excluded from the econometric specification. Thus, studies omitting trust in government may lead to biased estimates of the relation between populist party affiliation and opposition to climate policies. Moreover, the relation between political orientation and support of onshore wind energy appears to be sensitive to the scale used to measure political orientation. Finally, we find no evidence that political orientation relates to support of solar energy, suggesting that the role of political orientation in public support differs across renewable energies