Transcript Slide 1
Tariq Banuri and Adil Najam “Civic Entrepreneurship – A Civil Society Perspective on Sustainable Development”. Tariq Banuri and Adil Najam’s approach to sustainable development: • unlike conventional theoretical analyses, it does not focus on the outcome or the process • it focuses centrally on the starting point of sustainable development, namely the will of those who champion sustainable development in practice and define it through their practices – The will = the motivation, the incentives, the background, the resolve → in short the entrepreneurial spirit • naturally, this is not meant to deny the importance of either outcome or process but to suggest that there is an equally important third approach that needs to be added to the mix • Much of the literature defines sustainable development in a manner that places agency almost exclusively in the hands of the government • The policy and academic literature produced by financial institutions translates the entire problematique into the need for market reform – getting pricing right, internalizing costs, removing distortions and compensating for incomplete or missing markets. • While the role that civil society has played is acknowledged, it is viewed as secondary and supporting in nature • Not much attention is paid to the significance or future promise of what has beem termed ‘civil will’ • sustainable development is not a blueprint – It always involves newness • a new way of pulling things together, new ways of mobilizing resources, building legitimacy, engendering collective action, stimulating economic activity or adapting technology… • In short, it involves entrepreneurship – entrepreneur is not necessarily an inventor or manager or financier – he may just as easily be someone who adopts somebody else’s idea, borrows money from a bank and hires a manager to put the idea to practical use in a business or factory • Without entrepreneurship, ideas or inventions cannot impact development • The entrepreneur has – the imagination to see the potential for profit from the innovation (i.e. the practical application of the technique), – the initiative actually to carry out the task of introducing the innovation, and – a willingness to take the calculated risk that the effort might fail and lead to a loss rather than a profit Civic Entrepreneurs • a form of entrepreneurship that aims for social change • active members of the society, contributing to the comprehensive development of the community • Civic entrepreneurship distinguish from private entrepreneurship – it refers to civic activity that brings people together, builds partnerships and collaborations and as authors say “generally contribute to the social capital of society” • it may be compared to a river flowing uphill, forced by the will of civic entrepreneurs • Banuri& Najam show that the civil will and civic entrepreneurship can create a new political will for sustainable development – the community can change the direction of the local politics by active participation • Civil society is able to give a political will and through that the public policy a push through awareness-raising, advocacy, activity and agitation • Civil will can also pull policy reform by providing policy services. And in addition it can create spaces for champions of reform within policy systems • it can be said that the policy can be “pushed around” by civic entrepreneurs, in their community they have a role of monitors and advocates • the civil society plays a role of pulling the sustainable development either by taking the role on its own or by government formally asked • There are no ‘tricks’ or ‘short cuts’, no single best route and no secret recipe for achieving sustainable development – It demands sheer grit, lots of hard work, perseverance, the courage to imagine sustainable tomorrows, and the will to translate this imagination into reality • Depending on the context, environment, support, and nurturing, every seed will produce a different tree – and many will produce nothing at all • Yet, for the policy maker, for the philanthropist, for the financial donor, for the activist, for the academic, and most of all for the prospective civic entrepreneur, there are lessons to be learned from these stories, about ingredients that figure in every instance, and patterns that come up repeatedly • Banuri& Najam highlighted the seven key ‘identifying marks’ that can help us recognize sustainable development in practice – – – – – – – Investment in people Investment in innovation Investment in institutions Investment in communication Investment in partnerships Investment in support systems Investment in imitation Innovation • The word ‘innovation’ conjures images of a scientist hard at work in a lab to produce a new product – The reality in sustainable development is quite different • In case after case the authors found that the idea itself was very simple – lending money to a poor woman, building a cooperative, harvesting drinking water in tanks or other structures – what was new was how it was implemented • Innovators in sustainable development; – their innovation lies not in the product, but in the process – a key lesson from these stories is that the pursuit of sustainable development requires innovation in the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’ • The business sector benefits from enormous public investment in institutions that make it easy for the entrepreneur to innovate and the manager to imitate • Every good business school provides courses on innovation to thousands of future managers – civic entrepreneurship has to be learned by each individual separately • Venture capitalists and incubators provide the initial support and nurturing environment for innovative business ideas, but there are hardly any such institutions in the public domain • Innovation has become routinized into corporate R&D systems, which more or less automatically churn out new ideas and find ways of developing new products and processes based on these ideas • However, with a very few exceptions (for example, the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh) such diversification has not become characteristic of mature civic entrepreneurial activities The authors present several cases where… • innovation by civil society opened the doors for more meaningful collaboration with government after the benefits of doing things differently were demonstrated • ‘doing things differently’ essentially meant doing things crosssectorally • the bridges of collaboration that needed to be built were not only between government and civil society but also between different actors (authors’ examples: fisher-folk and farmers, grazers and irrigators, agronomists and ecologists) • The key turning point in each story is when those who are used to viewing things within their narrow sectoral or actoral confines are finally able to see across those divides • Sustainable development has been achieved in practice mainly through the imagination and will of ‘public sector’ entrepreneurs – just as industrialization and economic growth took place through the imagination and will of private entrepreneurs Innovation • The introduction to something new • A new idea, method or device • Innovation is a change in the thought process for doing something, or the useful application of new inventions or discoveries. Capacity for innovation • encourage decision-making across disciplines • understand interdependence between environmental, economic and social systems • open to new ideas • appreciate role of human ingenuity • challenge the status quo • to create new knowledge and implement this in new marketable products and services, is of prominent importance for growth and prosperity International Institute for Sustainable Development "In a 2007 study by IISD of the key leadership skills for sustainability, “Capacity for Innovation” emerged as the top skill. For 51 per cent of the young people interviewed, capacity for innovation was one of their top three values."