Can social entrepreneurship formulate socio-environmental synergies and to what extent?

• In Event: Social entrepreneurship

Abstract

“Environmental management is not the central political issue among the poor; survival is. If the two can be clearly related, as indeed they are at the policy level, then, and only then, is there a prospect for these changes having any real meaning” (Baker 1989: 160). In the past decades, environmental management organisations in Hong Kong advanced the environmental governance by the then colonial government and took on the term “sustainable development” to build up social acceptance (Mai & Francesch-Huidobro 2015). However, when socio-economic crises occured, the government of Hong Kong was forced to address constant social challenges and sidelined the environmental governance (Tsang 2017). While social and environmental issues being segmented at the policy level, grassroots organisations in Hong Kong started to integrate these two fields by practising social entrepreneurship (SE) to initiate social and institutional innovations.
The definition of SE is deeply embedded in the social, economic, political and cultural contexts whilst it contains two definite characteristics: the primacy of social and/or environmental aims and the activity of trading goods and services. Although the Hong Kong government encourages the practice of SE (Chan et al., 2019), it does not intend to formalise SE while the term has been dominantly associated with and represented by NGOs providing workfare and social welfare services due to the policy attention to poverty alleviation (Chandra et al., 2021; Ho & Chan, 2010).
Drawing upon institutional theory, Chandra (2017) discovered that social entrepreneurs employ multiple discourses to bring about institutional changes in Hong Kong. Initiating institutional changes and innovations, however, are not without challenges and costs. Social entrepreneurs aim at non-state-led institutional changes and thus have to seek ex-post “state accommodation” to be legitimized into formal institutions (DellaPosta et al. 2017). This process is highly reliant on political priorities and can easily fall out of preferences due to the pre-set political agenda (Lorenzoni & Benson 2014) or the vested interests within a hidden agenda of government (Urpelainen & Van de Graaf 2015). While Chandra’s study demonstrates the usefulness of institutional theory in advancing SE scholarship, the author calls for more research on the process of social entrepreneurship to generate institutional changes and evaluate the outcome. (Chandra, 2017).
Following up on the discussion on the relation between SE and institutional changes, this paper inquires how and to what extent SE can integrate social welfare practices and environmental management in Hong Kong to formulate institutional changes in socio-environmental governance. This conceptual paper offers two theoretical and empirical contributions. This paper proposes two approaches for social entrepreneurs to initiate institutional changes: 1) altering structural capacity with discursive dynamics, and 2) associating economic utilities with innovation legitimation. By drawing on illustrative case studies of one bottom-up SE endorsement system and three endorsed social-environmental social enterprises in Hong Kong, this paper tests and illustrates the proposed approaches to consider whether these ongoing institutional changes accommodate sufficient attempts to reshape social relations in environmental governance.

References

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Authors

• Qianqing Lindsay Mai, lindsayqmai@ecomuse.co.uk

• Edwina Zhu, The University of Edinburgh

• Anna Na Li, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Australian Government

• Elizabeth Lai, Reconnect