ESRC/DEFRA/Social Enterprise Coalition
Strategic Partners Public Policy Seminar
“Social Enterprise and the Environment”

DEFRA, Smith Square

At last, a series of seminars that tries to engage all social enterprise stakeholders around the central theme of entrepreneurial responses to the environmental challenges that the world faces.  Judging by the range of people at the event, from social enterprise investors and social entrepreneurs through to, in their own words, “policy wonks” and academics, I was surely not the only person who welcomed the initiative.

This seminar, the first in a series, covered a lot of ground.  The first speaker, Dr. Mick Blowfield from the University of Oxford, took as his starting point the fact that entrepreneurs are change agents and can survive in any environment, whether in large or small companies, public or private sector organisations or mainstream or social enterprises.   His argument, based on a five year study of Aruka Fair Trade Tea, was that the jury is really still out on whether or not fair-trade delivers on its social enterprise goals.  He pointed out that an absence of data at every level hampers our understanding of just what we can expect from businesses that have explicit social enterprise (or, more accurately, corporate social responsibility) goals and therefore it is important to manage expectations. This lack of data means that sometimes claims are made about achievements which, because they are far-fetched, actually damage the reputation of the movement itself.

The second speaker, Dr. Dan van der Horst addressed the issue of renewable energy generation on the remote Orkney island of Westray.  The UK is the second biggest emitter of CO2 and the biggest laggard in terms of renewable energy development in the European Union.  Dan gave an entertaining view of why renewable energy production was vital to the Westray community.  He argued that the social enterprise model was most appropriate for the island because production could not be done on a large scale: the island is not part of any national grid and this means that large scale energy producers are not interested in supplying it.  His conclusion – that where energy needs to be produced on a small scale, for example for residential housing or for re-use of furniture), local authorities and development agencies should have the resources to help facilitate social enterprise solutions to renewable energy generation problems.

It was left to a practitioner, Nigel Lowthrop, the founder of Hill Holt Wood, to explain how these visions could be made into reality.  Hill Holt Wood is a community-owned ancient woodland that is managed in an entirely sustainable way as an environmental and social enterprise.  All its energy is produced from renewable sources and all surpluses are used to reinvest in the project itself.  Nigel argued that it is possible for all energy to be produced in a renewable way and that social enterprise is the only way that will deliver the environmental returns that we need to halt the process of climate change.

Finally, a policy overview from Julie Hitchcock of DEFRA tracked the history of social and environmental enterprise policy in the department and stressed the complexity of the policy context now.  She argued that policy should not simply “regulate and enforce” but that it was also necessary to use a range of different instruments and draw heavily on expertise amongst stakeholder and expert groups to arrive at sustainable policy solutions.

The event was setting out the stall for the remaining seminars in the series and, as a result, covered a lot of ground in a relatively short space of time.  However, there was not a single person at the event who could not see the urgency with which solutions needed to be found.

I left the event with more questions that had been answered by the speakers or the workshop discussion and this is a good thing.  For example, can we afford to see one business model as the only way to address the challenges of climate change?  When we talk about environmental entrepreneurship, what precisely do we mean? 

Many see clean tech and environmental entrepreneurship as synonymous but there are so many ways in which entrepreneurial solutions can be brought to bear on environmental challenges that it would be a big mistake to bundle everything into one box or hide it behind one model.  Plenty of environmental businesses are also “for profit” and, equally, plenty of social enterprises do not necessarily have an environmental agenda. 

In the end, though, the imperatives of climate change and environmental destruction are too huge to allow any scope for deliberation or dogma.  Anything that keeps the issue at the top of everyone’s agenda has to be helpful.