Crafting markets and fostering entrepreneurship within underserved communities: social ventures and clean energy provision in Asia

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we conceptualize markets for underserved communities as being constituted by local institutions that reflect the modalities of these individual’s lives. Using data on the activities that four social ventures across India, Bangladesh and Cambodia have undertaken to craft new markets for their clean energy solutions, we highlight how these actors incorporate their technologies within native material understandings, develop transaction systems consistent with resident consumption practices and entrench their organizations into the existing infrastructure. We term these processes indigenizing, microprovisioning and codeveloping, respectively. In meshing local context as part of their market crafting efforts, these ventures seed micro-entrepreneurship activity, generate employment for locals as well as improve standards of living within the community through the provision of productivity enhancing products and services. Our findings highlight the significance of engaging with local institutions as part of market crafting efforts in these scenarios. This paper offers insights that contribute to the sociology of markets, and poverty reduction via entrepreneurship literatures as well as have important practical and policy implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Market development
• local institutions
• sociology of markets
• underserved communities
• poverty
• clean energy
• Asia

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Marc Ventresca, Geoff Desa, the editors of this special issue and the participants of the 2014 SEE Conference, the 2015 AOM Conference and the 2018 ERD-SI Workshop in Hangzhou, China for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For the fourth venture (Grameen Shakti), we relied significantly on our interactions with Nancy Wimmer, who has done 19 years of ongoing fieldwork with the organization (since its inception in 1996) and has written a book (Wimmer 2012) based on this. We conducted three interviews with her in which she recounted her field experiences and the key insights that emerged from it.

2. Rice husk is an amorphous and low-density fuel that produces a gas with high tar content, that experts had deemed unfit for a single-fuel mode of operation.