Social entrepreneurship: a new model for inclusive recovery in post-crisis situations

Abstract

In post-crisis situations, people affected by the crisis struggle to recover due to a weak or complete absence of supporting institutional setups. On some occasions, private organizations are active in providing supportive services complementing traditional informal capitalists in filling institutional voids. This has created further challenges and can overwhelm the on-going recovery processes. However, local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can be considered as social enterprises, substituting private or informal capitalists‟ roles to fill the institutional voids in post-war situations. This changing condition allows social enterprises to pursue institutional voids as entrepreneurial opportunities to help war-affected citizens to enter into markets and improve their socio-economic wellbeing. However, it is unclear how social enterprises create new entities, ties and norms to support war-affected citizens to connect them into market and main stream development. Drawing on four cases of entrepreneurial NGOs in eastern Sri Lanka, the paper explores a) how social enterprises forms new entities, branches and ties as supporting organizations and b) how affected people become inclusive in this changing situations. The major finding suggests that NGOs play an intermediary role in post-war eastern Sri Lanka and to make the war-affected citizens inclusive in on-going recovery processes.