Escaping the green prison: Entrepreneurship and the creation of opportunities for sustainable development (possibly gated) is a paper by Desirée F. Pacheco, Thomas J. Dean b, and David S. Payne soon to be published in the Journal of Business Venturing.
It’s a fresh paper on the topic of sustainable entrepreneurship that looks at how and why entrepreneurs create changes in society. It’s full of real life examples as well as some interesting theory. The emphasis of the paper is on how entrepreneurs themselves, and through business led non-profits, create change with little mention on the role of traditional environmental non-profits. This leaves the paper with the feeling that entrepreneurs have taken the lead role in creating changes in norms, property rights, and so on. I’m not so sure that’s the case, but nevertheless, it’s nice to read a paper that highlights the collective action of entrepreneurs rather than that of governments or non-profits.
Abstract:
While entrepreneurial activity has been an important force for social and ecological
sustainability; its ef?cacy is dependent upon the nature of market incentives. This limitation
is sometimes explained by the metaphor of the prisoner’s dilemma, which we term the green
prison. In this prison, entrepreneurs are compelled to environmentally degrading behavior due
to the divergence between individual rewards and collective goals for sustainable
development. Entrepreneurs, however, can escape from the green prison by altering or
creating the institutions—norms, property rights, and legislation—that establish the incentives
of competitive games. We provide a variety of evidence of such entrepreneurial action and
discuss its implications for theory and practice.
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