Supporting or reshaping? A study on social enterprise development policy in Scotland

• In Event: Social Enterprise Policy and Law

Abstract

New governance arrangements are observed to integrate different and sometimes contradictory mechanisms in innovative ways to accommodate emerging hybrid organizations in public service delivery (Koppenjan, Karré & Termeer, 2019). ‘Hybrid governance’ is used to depict such coordination of various policy instruments and governance methods at different government levels to bring stakeholder groups together to address ‘wicked problems’ collectively (Koppenjan, Karré & Termeer, 2019; Koliba, 2019). Social Enterprises (SEs) are thus encouraged by governments to enter public service markets in hybrid governance arrangements (Vicker, Lyon, Sepulveda & McMullinb, 2017).
The Scottish Government has shown strong for SEs in the past decades. The SNP-led Scottish Government has developed dedicated policy support to promote SE as a sustainable provider of public services in Scotland (Mazzei & Roy, 2017). One important policy is the legislation of the Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014, in which the Community Benefit clauses require contractors to demonstrate contributions to the society or environment. This was expected to give SEs advantages to bid for a public contract and to increase their negotiation power over local authorities’ decisions on public services (Steiner & Teasdale, 2017). However, Mazzei and Roy (2017) illuminate that due to austerity, the so-called added value and the community benefit were undermined by the consideration of cost. Local authorities favour large and financially sustainable organisations rather than small-scale SEs to deliver large contracts. As Roy et al. (2015) commented, local authorities in Scotland have a schizophrenic attitude towards involving SEs in service delivery, being welcoming to this idea on one hand, while on the other, remaining cautious about awarding public contracts to them.
This begs the questions of whether and how governments at different levels and stakeholders can negotiate to organize and manage hybrid arrangements. To address these questions, this paper conducted a qualitative case study on the implementation of public policy for social enterprise development in Scotland. The data was collected between October 2015 and June 2016 with stakeholders involved in SE development in Scotland. Totally 22 interviewees were approached through snowball sampling. They belonged to five groups according to their organisation’s functions: the Scottish Government (N=5); local councils/authorities (N=7); social enterprise umbrella organisations (N=5); the Scottish Parliament (N=1); third-sector umbrella organisations (N=2); social enterprise practitioners (N=2). The paper adopted an interpretive approach to analyse the effectiveness of public policy implementation. While the preliminary findings resonated with the literature that local authorities tend to stick to the existing public institutions and remain reluctant to involve SEs in public services procurement (e.g. Henderson, Hall, Mutongi & Geoff, 2019), the data further showed that individual enthusiastic staff members in local authorities tended to work with SEs and third-sector umbrella organisations to push the implementation of policy support. This potentially adds new insights into self-organising collaborations to manage hybrid arrangements.

References

• Henderson, F., Hall, K., Mutongi, A., & Whittam, G. (2019). Social enterprise, social innovation and self-directed care: lessons from Scotland. Social Enterprise Journal, 15(4), 438-456.
• Koliba, C. (2019). The Value Neutrality of 'Smart' and 'Self'-Governance. In J. Koppenjan, P. M. Karre, & K. Termeer (Eds.), Smart Hybridity: Potentials and Challenges of New Governance Arrangements (pp. 111-116). Hague; Chicago, IL: Eleven International Publishing.
• Koppenjan, J., Karre, P. M., & Termeer, K. (2019). New Governance Arrangements. Towards Hybrid and Smarter Government? In J. Koppenjan, P. M. Karre, & K. Termeer (Eds.), Smart Hybridity: Potentials and Challenges of New Governance Arrangements (pp. 1-28). Hague; Chicago, IL: Eleven International Publishing.
• Mazzei, M., & Roy, M. J. (2017). From Policy to Practice: Exploring Practitioners’ Perspectives on Social Enterprise Policy Claims. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 28(6), 2449-2468.
• Roy, M. J., McHugh, N., Huckfield, L., Kay, A., & Donaldson, C. (2015). ‘The most supportive environment in the world’? Tracing the development of an institutional ‘ecosystem’ for social enterprise. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 26(3), 777-800.
• Steiner, A., & Teasdale, S. (2017). Unlocking the potential of rural social enterprise. Journal of Rural Studies, 70, 144-154.
• Vickers, I., Lyon, F., Sepulveda, L., & McMullin, C. (2017). Public service innovation and multiple institutional logics: The case of hybrid social enterprise providers of health and wellbeing. Research Policy, 46(10), 1755-1768.

Author

• Edwina Zhu, The University of Edinburgh