فرار از زندان سبز: کارآفرینی و ایجاد فرصت هایی برای توسعه پایدار

While entrepreneurial activity has been an important force for social and ecological sustainability; its efficacy is dependent upon the nature of market incentives. This limitation is sometimes explained by the metaphor of the prisoner's dilemma, which we term the green prison. In this prison, entrepreneurs are compelled to environmentally degrading behavior due to the divergence between individual rewards and collective goals for sustainable development. Entrepreneurs, however, can escape from the green prison by altering or creating the institutions—norms, property rights, and legislation—that establish the incentives of competitive games. We provide a variety of evidence of such entrepreneurial action and discuss its implications for theory and practice.

Both popular and academic writers have asserted that the innovative process of entrepreneurship can serve as a central force in the development of an ecologically and socially sustainable economy (Anderson and Leal, 1997, Anderson and Leal, 2001, Bennett, 1991, Blue, 1990, Dean and McMullen, 2007, Hawken, 1994, Hawken et al., 1999 and Shaper, 2002). Unfortunately, theoretical and empirical research on the topic has lagged well behind both entrepreneurial activity and popular interest in the phenomenon. To date, little research on entrepreneurship and sustainable development has appeared in the academic literature and we are only just beginning to understand their relationship, let alone the complexities of the phenomenon (Dean and McMullen, 2007 and Shaper, 2002). Foremost among the issues in the study of entrepreneurship and sustainable development is the paradox between normative claims of entrepreneurship as the solution to sustainable development challenges, and research in environmental and welfare economics that emphasizes the limits to sustainable entrepreneurial action. Indeed, the assertions of sustainable entrepreneurship proponents stand in contrast to well-known theoretical prescriptions in the economics literature. Most important amongst the latter, is the conclusion that the public and non-excludable character of social and environmental resources often creates a divergence between individual and collective incentives, which is revealed in the incidence of self-interested behavior that degrades social and environmental conditions (Carraro and Fragnelli, 2004, Hardin, 1968, Tietenberg, 2000 and Pigou, 1932). This conclusion raises the question of whether and how the process of entrepreneurship can contribute to sustainability, when a large body of research concludes that many social and environmental goods are not amenable to market allocation (see Section 3.2 for some examples) ( Bator, 1958, Hardin, 1968, Carraro and Fragnelli, 2004, Cropper and Oates, 1992, McWhinnie, 2009 and Pigou, 1932). The implication of this is that sustainable entrepreneurship is constrained to contexts where individual and collective incentives are aligned under the existing system of economic institutions. In contrast, in the absence of such conditions, sustainable entrepreneurship would fail to exist and fulfill its normative implications. We suggest, however, that this conclusion is often misguided. Developments in institutional economics and entrepreneurship theory can help to explain how entrepreneurs overcome suboptimal market incentives to create sustainable entrepreneurship opportunities and enhance both global and competitive sustainability (Aldrich and Kenworthy, 1999, Alvarez and Barney, 2007, Anderson and Leal, 1997, Anderson and Leal, 2001, Langlois, 1992, North and Thomas, 1970 and Sarasvathy, 2001). We follow this rationale to answer the question of whether and how entrepreneurs can engender institutional incentives to sustainable development and achieve the normative expectations implied in the concept of sustainable entrepreneurship. Following a body of research in game theory (Axelrod, 1984, Maynard Smith and Price, 1973 and Schelling, 1978), environmental economics (Carraro and Fragnelli, 2004, Oses-Eraso and Viladrich-Grau, 2007 and Tietenberg, 2000), and institutional economics (Bromley, 1989, North, 1991, Schotter, 1981 and Sugden, 1986), we view sustainability challenges as a prisoners' dilemma problem wherein entrepreneurs face a potential competitive disadvantage when pursuing costly sustainable actions, as such costs may not be borne by competitors. We refer to this entrepreneurial predicament as the “green prison”: wherein entrepreneurs are compelled to unsustainable behavior by the process of competition, given that sustainable actions are punished, rather than rewarded. Yet we transcend the game theory literature to introduce a more complete understanding of sustainable entrepreneurship, which lies in expanding the concept of the sustainable entrepreneur from discoverer of opportunity in extant economic structures to structural agent who develops institutions to change the “rules of the game” and thereby drives sustainable behaviors. We argue that entrepreneurs can create sustainable opportunities by proactively devising and influencing the establishment of new industry norms, property rights, and government legislation that transform the payoffs of their competitive games. This enables them to “escape from the green prison” by altering the rewards for sustainable behavior in a way that improves their competitiveness and profit potential. These actions allow entrepreneurs to create the social structure that is necessary for the growth of sustainable sectors ( Kuznets, 1966 and Kuznets, 1972). Even though technological innovation is important in promoting such growth, entrepreneurs also recognize the need to devise novel incentive systems that support new types of economic transactions ( Daft, 1978, Damanpour, 1987, Kimberly and Evanisko, 1981, Kuznets, 1966 and Kuznets, 1972). We contribute to the literature on entrepreneurship and sustainable development in a number of ways. First, we utilize the metaphor of the prisoner's dilemma to help communicate how entrepreneurs may change the rules of competitive games to achieve their individual interests while generating positive collective outcomes. While research in welfare and environmental economics has employed game theory and the prisoners' dilemma to understand the external effects of corporate activity, it has generally not transcended the dilemma to propose market-based solutions to these conditions (Bimonte, 2008 and McWhinnie, 2009; Oses-Eraso and Viladrich-Grau, 2007; see Ostrom, 1990 and Oses-Eraso and Viladrich-Grau, 2007 and Anderson and Leal, 2001, for some exceptions). Second, and perhaps most importantly, we emphasize the potential for entrepreneurial action to establish new institutional incentives for sustainable development, and markets for social and environmental resources. This approach is unique in that few authors describe how entrepreneurs act to transcend collectively sub-optimal incentives structures for sustainable entrepreneurship (see Anderson and Leal, 2001, and Dean and McMullen, 2007, for some exceptions). Third, our approach is likely the first to incorporate the creation view of entrepreneurship and opportunity into the discussion of sustainable entrepreneurship. Embracing a more subjectivist ontology, the creation view allows for proactive agency on the part of entrepreneurs and expands the conception of sustainable entrepreneurship beyond deterministic approaches, which consider institutional development to be external to the entrepreneurial process. We distinguish between sustainable entrepreneurship discovery opportunities, which are present in existing economic structures, and sustainable entrepreneurship creation opportunities, which require the development of new economic institutions. Fourth, through the integration of research from institutional economics, we comprehensively address the specific means by which entrepreneurs overcome institutional barriers to sustainable entrepreneurial action. While some authors have proposed individual solutions to specific market conditions (Ostrom, 1990 and Oses-Eraso and Viladrich-Grau, 2007), none have addressed such a broad array of solutions to prisoners' dilemma problems in this arena. Neither have these been comprehensively addressed in the sole context of entrepreneurship and the pursuit of economic opportunity. We believe that our theoretical analysis provides the basis for understanding how entrepreneurs create sustainable ventures and thereby imply normative recommendations to entrepreneurs, investors, and policy-makers. We begin our examination with an explanation of the phenomenon of the green prison, which roots entrepreneurial conflict in environmental performance with the concept of the prisoner's dilemma. We then present the incentives that drive entrepreneurs to escape the green prison and the implications of such actions on the discovery and creation theories of entrepreneurship and more specifically, sustainable entrepreneurship. Following this, we explain how entrepreneurs escape the green prison by transforming a range of institutions, including: industry norms, property rights, and government legislation. In this process, we explicate our arguments with specific examples. Finally, we conclude with a comprehensive description of the limitations and most importantly, the implications that our perspective has for entrepreneurial action in sustainable development.

Perhaps most importantly, our examination implies that a complete understanding of sustainable entrepreneurship requires consideration of the means by which entrepreneurs transform economic institutions, and thereby escape the green prison that is intrinsic to many natural and environmental resource problems. As such, sustainable entrepreneurship in its most theoretically interesting and empirically meaningful form is characterized by the processes of creation, as opposed to discovery, and the proactive agency of entrepreneurs who transform economic systems to the benefit of both society and themselves. These sustainable development creation entrepreneurs hold norms, property rights, government legislation and the generalized processes of collective action in their entrepreneurial toolkit. The nature of creation opportunities they pursue, the manner in which they do so, and the individual and collective outcomes they generate from their actions are central issues in research on entrepreneurship and sustainable development; as well as in understanding how entrepreneurs can help create a sustainable future.