Entrepreneurship in Conservation and Development

Entrepreneurship and Market Based Instruments are promoted to tackle socio-environmental problems, with some authors proclaiming that the conservation sector needs to be more entrepreneurial. Yet, entrepreneurial lenses are rarely applied to projects in conservation, or researched by critical social scientists working on them. There is a lack of understanding of entrepreneurial processes and how they might be facilitated in the sector, which is surprising considering the dominant position of Market-Based Instruments in conservation practice. This thesis seeks to address this gap by applying an ethnographic approach to study entrepreneurs operating honey and baobab enterprises in central Mozambique. It first establishes the impacts of these interventions using local perceptions. It then explores the processes constituting entrepreneurship. Finally, it explores how entrepreneurs create change in rural institutions and how their initiatives adapt in the field. I find that the contribution of the focal enterprises to rural livelihoods outstrips other external interventions, with rural communities expressing a strong desire to be connected to markets. Our entrepreneurs have navigated a difficult institutional environment using a specific combination of skills and processes, which I demonstrate through an application of entrepreneurial theory.
The key argument of this thesis is entrepreneurs are important to advance conservation and development goals as they connect rural people to markets and incentivise positive institutional change. These approaches however pose risks to participating communities, e.g. due to interactions of dependency and market volatility, and require significant additional activities to influence institutional change. The exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities in conservation is also hindered by a lack of engagement with the concept, a hostile environment, poorly structured support, and the malleability of MBIs (their rules and norms can be reconfigured and undermined).
I argue entrepreneurship is an illuminating lens for conservation, inherently relevant to MBIs. If conservation publications would pay more attention to these lenses, it would increase the visibility of these processes, potentially altering the way entrepreneurship is viewed and mediating positive entrepreneurship for people and environment.