Insights on Case Studies in Asia

Bishan Singh Bahadur

taken from IRED DSS :Asia No. 08

The social enterprise economy:

• can be defined as an economy which has social benefit for a particular group or community, as its ultimate objective;
• has ethics as its core - it is caring and sharing and exercises the responsibility of stewardship for a common future;
• adopts a people-centred and community-centred development approach and therefor tends to be need-specific, area-specific, or culture specific;
• recognises and reinforces diversity as the essence of community and synthesises that diversity into unity in the way the community organises its economy, politics and social norms;
• is businesslike as regards efficiency, cost effectiveness and optimum use of resources - it ensures that the community becomes self-reliant before exchanging surpluses with other communities;
• reinvests whatever wealth is created into the community to enrich the community, or gives it in trade to another community, to improve is quality of life;
• researches technologies which save resources and recycle, and adopt alternative ways of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services, which ensure equity, environmental protection, social sustainability, biodiversity and the generative capacity of the ecosystem;
• uses the quality of life as the bottom line measurement of the economy;
• is evolutionary and not static - it is a process of change.

Source: Development 1995:3 Journal of SID