Governing Collective Agency in Community Development: Conceptual Foundations and Propositions for Collective Entrepreneurship

Collective entrepreneurship in community development is often discussed through participation, ownership, collaboration, and social value creation, yet the governance mechanism through which a collective exercises agency remains under-specified. This article develops governed collective agency as the conceptual centre of a Collective Entrepreneurship (CE) Model. The construct refers to the organised capacity of a collective to initiate and sustain purposive action through arrangements that allocate voice, decision authority, resource control, ownership claims, accountability obligations, and benefit entitlements within a specific territorial context. Drawing purposively on community-development theory, collective entrepreneurship, community-based enterprise, social entrepreneurship, cooperative and collaborative governance, participation, territorial development, stakeholder governance, and learning, the article distinguishes normative principles, cross-cutting governance conditions, coordination constraints, and recursive learning. Six conceptual propositions specify expected relationships concerning participation and legitimacy, governance congruence, resource dependence, recursive learning, territorial embeddedness, and scaling. The contribution is integrative rather than foundational: it clarifies the governance logic that connects collective entrepreneurial action to power, ownership, accountability, representation, and benefit distribution while defining explicit boundary conditions and an empirical research agenda.