Exploring enabling resources for place-based social entrepreneurship: a participatory study of Green Care practices in Finland

Abstract

Enabling resources are the array of tangible and intangible assets that social entrepreneurs mobilize or create to bring forward novel place-based initiatives, to respond to unmet sustainability challenges and ideally contribute to virtuous processes of socioeconomic transformation. Understanding the role of resources in constraining or enabling the development of social enterprises holds important implications not merely for the initiatives, but also for the places where they are embedded. Existing studies fail to provide a comprehensive, empirically grounded account of resources for place-based social entrepreneurship. This paper aims to fill this gap, by exploring the array of resources that enable and constrain the development of Green Care practice, i.e., nature-based activities with a social innovation purpose. Three communities of Finnish practitioners-a nature-tourism company, a care farm, and a biodynamic farm-were involved over the span of 3 years in research activities conducted with an in-depth qualitative approach. Participants were engaged in several stages of iterative learning combining conventional and action-research methods: semi-structured interviews, participatory mapping, and a co-creation workshop. Results show that entrepreneurs resort to a great variety of enabling resources, inclusive of both tangible and intangible assets, that are only marginally considered by relevant literature. Based on these findings, the paper proposes a novel set of enabling resources, comprehensive of nine clusters: infrastructural, institutional, material, place-specific, organizational culture-related, social, ethical, affective, and competence-related. Two concluding insights can be inferred: understanding resources is paramount to grasp possibilities and challenges of place-based entrepreneurship; in-depth participatory processes are needed for a thorough and grounded investigation of enabling resources in places.

The inner dimension of sustainability transformation: how sense of place and values can support sustainable place-shaping

“…So these practices create connections between nature and society, the local and the global, the rural and the urban (Roep et al 2015;Horlings 2019). Examples are local, organic food products, craftsmanship specific for a locality or region, nature-inclusive agriculture; agreements for the provision of ecosystem services such as green care adapted to the specific context (Moriggi 2019); and local citizen initiatives supporting energy transition (Soares da Silva et al 2018).…”

Seeking Inclusion through Local Entrepreneurship Training Initiatives in Low-Income Communities

“…A remarkable finding was the sense of social responsibility expressed by business owners in their desire to support the community while and after growing their businesses. This relates to the concept of embeddedness discussed by McKeever et al, (2014) and Moriggi (2019). Embeddedness views entrepreneurship as a socialized relational process in which the entrepreneur is part of the social context and their actions are partly motivated by the desire to respond to the needs of this context.…”

Exploring the transformative capacity of place-shaping practices

“…Conditional for these capacities are enabling resources which refers to the wide array of assets, both tangible and intangible, social entrepreneurs mobilize and co-create, to launch and bring forward novel initiatives in their places. Moriggi (2019) explores the array of resources that enable and constrain the development of Green Care practices, i.e., nature-based activities with a social innovation purpose. Participants in three in-depth case studies of green care provisioning in Finland were engaged in several stages of iterative learning combining conventional and action-research methods: semi-structured interviews, participatory mapping, and a co-creation workshop.…”