Rethinking green entrepreneurship? Fluid narratives of the green economy

O'Neill, Kirstie ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3954-9933 and Gibbs, David 2016. Rethinking green entrepreneurship? Fluid narratives of the green economy. Environment and Planning A 48 (9) , pp. 1727-1749. 10.1177/0308518X16650453

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

Green entrepreneurs have been seen as key drivers for a transition to a green economy. However, there has been limited in-depth qualitative empirical research with green entrepreneurs to date, focusing instead on typologies categorising certain ‘types’ of green entrepreneur. Moreover, the literature rarely situates such individual activities within broader concepts such as the green economy. In contrast, we suggest that current discourses of the green economy are important in contextualising the ways that green entrepreneurs make sense of themselves and their businesses. Green entrepreneurs are thus negotiating varying tensions between their business activities, environmental philosophies and wider contexts at the intersection between the green economy and the mainstream economy. Drawing on evidence from 55 interviews, we explore the narratives employed by green entrepreneurs to situate themselves within/outwith the wider green economy – the recursive framing of mainstream and niche ‘green’ activities provides a sense of the tensions and politics at play in the development of the green economy. We thus offer a new and more dynamic view of the evolving nature of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ a green entrepreneur, rather than relying on the fixed categories espoused in previous typologies. We conclude that it is important that policy makers recognise the complex and contentious nature of green entrepreneurship, and that it is essential to view the green economy as a diverse constellation of myriad actors rather than corporate reinventions of business as usual.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Geography and Planning (GEOPL)
Publisher:	Pion
ISSN:	0308-518X
Last Modified:	23 Oct 2022 13:23
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/110529

Citation Data

Cited 58 times in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item