Abstract
Community-based institutions used to be driven by local needs, but in recent decades, some of them have been responding to national and global economic opportunities. These cases are of interest because they make it possible to investigate how local institutions can evolve in response to new challenges. A promising set of cases comes from the UNDP Equator Initiative, a program that holds biennial searches to find and reward entrepreneurship cases that seek to reduce poverty and conserve biodiversity at the same time. What can we learn from these local entrepreneurship cases that seem to be playing at the global level? Here we focus on partnerships and horizontal and vertical linkages in a sample of ten Equator Initiative projects. We find that successful projects tend to interact with a large array of support groups, typically 10 to 15 partners. Based on information from on-site research, these partners include local and national NGOs; local, regional and (less commonly) national governments; international donor agencies and other organizations; and universities and research centers. These partners provide a range of services and support functions, including raising start-up funds; institution building; business networking and marketing; innovation and knowledge transfer; and technical training. These findings indicate that a diverse variety of partners are needed to help satisfy a diversity of needs, and highlight the importance of networks and support groups in the evolution of commons institutions.
Highlights
Rural and indigenous communities used to be isolated places and many still are
What can we learn from these local entrepreneurship cases that seem to be playing at the global level? Here we focus on partnerships and horizontal and vertical linkages in a sample of ten Equator Initiative projects
Successful community-based enterprises are those that take advantage of a window of opportunity (Olsson et al 2004) to establish linkages for their benefit, but most importantly, those that can foster the creation of such windows of opportunity
Summary
Rural and indigenous communities used to be isolated places and many still are. an increasing number of these communities are beginning to play a role in the globalized world, moving from the familiar role of victims of development, to an exciting new role as the co-authors of the scripts that define their relationships to the outside world. The short-listed cases are largely those that have been able to respond to national and global opportunities, and presumed to be cases “that work” These UNDP Equator Initiative cases have been used to explore several related themes: combining biodiversity conservation and poverty reduction (Timmer and Juma 2005), identifying characteristics of emerging indigenous businesses (Berkes and Adhikari 2006), recognizing self-organizational processes in integrated conservation and development (Seixas and Davy 2008), identifying innovative and successful ecoagriculture practices (Isely and Scherr 2003), exploring the role of community scaling-up in achieving the millennium development goals (MDGs) (Hooper et al 2004), and exploring the role of leadership in community-based conservation (Timmer 2004a,b), All UNDP Equator Initiative cases, by definition, involve a local-level organization working directly with community members. We aim to explore some of these complexities by carrying out case comparisons among community-based enterprises
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