Social Entrepreneurship and the Governance Context of Areas of Limited Statehood

The chapter addresses the need for conceptualising the socio-political context for Social Entrepreneurship in relation to neglected contexts within ‘developing countries’. The dominant understanding of context in the Social Entrepreneurship debates draws on insights on industrialised or emerging economy contexts to explain the contextual conditions for the emergence and development of the hybrid mission of Social Enterprises. However, such contextual factors do not reflect the realities in many developing countries and calls for a reconceptualization of context that incorporates amalgam of formal state actors and informal non-state actors. The literature on governance in Areas of Limited Statehood offers a novel and promising theoretical lens for conceptualising the complex configuration of diverse actors and their related governance systems beyond the state-centric understanding of context. A multi-level ALS governance framework is offered for scholars and students of the Social Entrepreneurship field that implies an acknowledgment of various types of formal as well as informal and even unconventional non-state actors, and how and why their socio-political governance influences the hybrid nature, driver, and impact of SEs throughout the developing world. The chapter argues that the governance lens advances the current debates on context within SE literature and offers promising future avenues for studying the context in which SEs operate across Areas of Limited Statehood.