Amidst escalating environmental degradation, scholars and practitioners have proposed regenerative business practices to restore and sustain social-ecological systems. However, regeneration fundamentally departs from mainstream, individualistic and profit-centric business approaches in that it adopts a holistic system-centric view that goes beyond the individual organization and includes the entire supply network. Understanding how regenerative actors, especially those in peripheral positions in the supply network, seek to gain internal and external legitimacy for regenerative practices throughout the supply networks is thus of major relevance for regenerative practices. We address this challenge by drawing upon qualitative analysis involving repeated interviews and field visits with regenerative producers in Spain to identify the legitimation strategies they used for targeting different supply network actors (vertical, horizontal, and diagonal). Our findings underscore the adaptive nature of these strategies in that they are tailored to different supply network actors and operationalized depending on the perceived ideological and geographical proximity to these actors. Our research contributes to the nascent field of regenerative business by unveiling how peripheral regenerative actors live up to the systemic aspirations of regeneration by seeking to legitimize regeneration throughout entire supply networks.
