Measuring the Sustainability of Social Entrepreneurship in Developing Economies

Abstract

Social entrepreneurship is found to be an important tool of overcoming socio-economic challenges in the developing economies by integrating socio-impact goals and entrepreneurial approaches. Nevertheless, little is known about the long term sustainability of social enterprises in environments that are defined by scarcity of resources, regulatory issues, and market uncertainties. The paper examines how the social entrepreneurship is sustainable in the environment of the developing economies in terms of financial, social, and environmental dimensions that influence the long-term sustainability. Under a mixed-method design, primary data were collected as structured interviews with sample developing country founders and managers of social enterprises and secondary data as in reports, case studies and academic literature. The research enumerates the key measures of sustainability that include organizational resilience, ability to innovate, stakeholder involvement and creation of stable revenue streams and maintenance of social objectives. Findings indicate that, enterprises, which integrate adaptive management concepts, create local community networks and exploit social capital, experience higher sustainability rates. On the contrary, the reliance on external sources of funding and lack of sound institutionalisation affect longevity to a debilitating degree. The other area that the research has determined is the relevance of policy frameworks and enabling ecosystems in enabling scalable and sustainable models of the social enterprises. The findings offer useful recommendations to both practitioners, policy makers and researchers who seek to reinforce the idea of social entrepreneurship programs in resource-scarce settings. With the systematic analysis of the sustainability on the various planes, the study transposes the delicate appreciation of the ways the social enterprise can flourish, evolve and survive in the new economies. Finally, the paper presents the fact that sustainability is not only a financial but also a social dimension and that directly corresponds to social relevance, the community within which it has been incorporated, and the process of adaptive governance.