This paper reports on an exploratory study with social enterprise stakeholders in Dumfries and Galloway and Scottish Borders focused on the potential of social enterprise to contribute to rural development. It considers three key domains that impact on this potential – the rural, the social enterprise and the policy.
It argues that ‘social enterprises can potentially enable an integrated approach to addressing local issues at the local level. They can create locally responsive services that fit the rural context. However, unlocking the potential of rural social enterprise may require moving beyond traditional policy silo approaches that treat economic development, community cohesion and public services as separate and disconnected since national policy-making frameworks have not always translated into practice at the rural level. Additionally, policy treatment of social enterprise needs to move beyond efforts to ‘scale up’ and achieve economies of scale’.
Read the full article here: Unlocking the potential of rural social enterprise
Steiner, A. and Teasdale, S. (2018) Unlocking the potential of rural Social Enterprise, Journal of Rural Studies, 70, 144-154. (doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2017.12.021)
