I introduced the groundbreaking work we are doing with the REWORK initiative, a partnership between Tällberg Foundation and YES, the youth employment summit. Rework seeks to scale up youth green jobs by brokering scale-oriented partnerships between green innovators and youth movements, providing new propositions to investors, business and governments.

The innovators profiled are part of the REWORK effort, plus we asked a number of people working with larger infrastructures — from the financial system, international aid, and business — to give their views on how to marry the Davids and the Goliaths. Enter the entrepreneurs:

• Iman Bibars, VP of Ashoka Egypt for her ‘Housing for All‘ initiative with whom we are working to generate entrepreneurship opportunities for young people;
• Pepijn Steemers, Director of D.light Designs East Africa for a solar energy partnership we are facilitating involving ‘young solar entrepreneurs’ in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda;
• Deepa Gupta of the Indian Youth Climate Network with whom we are planning to scale up their ‘climate solutions‘ programme by bringing in Indian business schools and investors;
• Minou Fuglesang, Executive Director of Femina HIP, a multimedia platform in Tanzania which reaches 2 million young people on issues of lifestyle and reproductive health, and with whom we are exploring ways to use the media platforms to inspire young entrepreneurs to start green businesses.

Bringing in the “infrastructure” perspectives:

• Carl Mossfeldt, Executive Vice President of the Tällberg Foundation who leads the REWORK initiative provided insights on the collaborative innovation being unleashed by the initiative and the methods behind it;
• John (Elkington, of Volans) gave examples from big business and the ways in which business connects (partners, buys out or copies) ideas from from front-running innovators.
• Herman Mulder, former Head of Risk Group at ABN Amro gave a clear set of ideas on how the financial system can be reworked to support entrepreneurs on the ground; and based on the cases of the different entrepreneurs profiled,
• Mia Horn at Rantzien, the new Deputy Director-General of SIDA, the Swedish International Development Agency, provided a refreshing perspective on how aid agencies could support entrepreneurial environments better in developing countries.

The sessions was powerful, the contributors connected to one another and provided their piece of the puzzle in a compelling way. Among the 60+ participants there was a sense of possibility. These pioneers are implementing cutting-edge solutions to some of the world’s most complex problems. Connecting entrepreneurs with youth movements and networks, channeling youth energy to scale up green business models, and bringing in investors and business with new development propositions, has the potential to create impacts that don’t fall short of systemic change.

It introduced a report to be released this week by the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) outlining that the UK is failing to meet almost all its targets, from carbon reduction, to income and health inequality. It highlighted that the UK is more about rhetoric than action and painted an extremely bleak picture.

So, being a glutton for punishment, I scoured the SDC website to read the report in full. I was however somewhat surprised when the only one I could find was the optimistically titled “Breakthroughs for the 21^st century”.

Two pages of the report are dedicated to the need for change, outlining the areas where the UK is coming up short. The lack of progress is of course very worrying, however the rest of the report gives us sign of hope, identifying 19 ideas, initiatives and successes that could be scaled up to help achieve a more sustainable future for the UK and meet the targets that have been set.

The ideas are collected in 3 main sections; sustainable lives, sustainable places and transition to a sustainable, low carbon economy.

Here are a few simple ideas that stood out for me:

Engagement - mobilising popular support and collective action

This section championed a series of on-line networks (e.g. Project Dirt www.projectdirt.com) which link environmental groups and projects to build the critical mass required to catalyse change.

Congress for the future – influencing long-term policy

This idea is around the creation of a special congress that would convene each year to provide long-term policy direction to the UK government. If effective this would help sustainability become a priority beyond political terms of office.

From pre-pay to pay as you save

This is a new way to finance energy efficiency in homes so a homeowner doesn’t have to pay up front to retro-fit their house and instead pays back instalments based on the energy efficiency savings that he/she makes. This will mean that energy efficiency measures become accessible to more homes.

So have a look at the report. Not all the ideas are new; you might not agree with all of them but they do highlight some tangible ways forward to improve the situation in the UK. Championing these in the media may help to spark the interest of entrepreneurs and communities around the UK and start the scaling up process.

You can access the report via the link below:

http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/publications.php?id=972

One of my favourite quotes “Solutions to America’s challenges are being developed every day at the grassroots. And government shouldn’t be supplanting those efforts, it should be supporting those efforts”.

Check out the full text

An excerpt:

“In recent years, social enterprise experts have clustered around the theory that social entrepreneurs are special, creating the disruptive social innovations that break down suboptimal social equilibria.  It’s an inspiring definition to be sure, one that no doubt is a boost to the self-esteem of anyone in the movement.  Yet if we look carefully at real-world movements for change, most of it has reflects the work of people who do not self-identify as social entrepreneurs.

“For example, consider how the protest movement is mobilizing.  The core communications media–Twitter, Facebook, blogs, SMS, mobile phones, computers, even the rooftops on which protesters stood to shout–may be tools that social entrepreneurs use, but we (social entrepreneurs)did not create them.  The social benefit resulting from social media is at best a positive externality, a second-order consequence derived from someone else’s disruptive innovations.  It is also useful to reflect upon the protesters’ organizational tactics.  They are not starting social businesses, extending microloans, holding pitch contests or making social investments.  Instead, they are taking to the streets and telling anyone who will listen or watch what they want.  It is a classic display of political force.  Each compelling image from Iran–every impassioned Tweet–is an implicit critique of our naive bubble world where the price of progress is merely a monetary value. If social enterprise is to mature as a movement, we can’t afford to believe our own hype.  The more we insist that social entrepreneurship is a unique agent of historic social change, the less effective–and less credible–we become.”

Traxler’s article throws cautions the culture of uniqueness, which has been the basis of the social entrepreneurship movement.  The term “social entrepreneurship” itself is associated with “Uncommon Heroes” and “Unreasonable People”, which imply a sense of individuality; Ashoka’s more universal slogan “Everyone a Changemaker” suggests that we all have something to contribute in our own, unique way.  Even my own research here at Volans is based on isolating the “unique” variables that make certain social enterprises successful.

While I find this sense of uniqueness essential to the innovation and inspiration that drives the success of social entrepreneurship, I feel Traxler has a powerful point.  When does uniqueness become exclusivity?  And when does exclusivity actually become constraining to a movement?

As Nathaniel Whittemore of change.org responds,

“It’s incredibly easy in any young, vibrant movement like our own to quickly enable a hegemony of thought that becomes its own constraining orthodoxy. To allow this to happen to the social entrepreneurship field would be deeply ironic, considering how much of its appeal is to people looking to harness great tools for changing the world from wherever they come.” (Whittemore)

The article doesn’t aim to strip social entrepreneurship of powerful influence in creating social change, but rather reminds the movement of its limits.  Iran’s Green Revolution teaches us that as much as we like to break down all social movements into a neat metric of a social enterprise’s success of scalability, sometimes we just can’t.  And sometimes to do so would be an arrogant move that proves inauthentic to the change itself and the people involved.

While the technology exists, the Pathways to Scale work we’ve been conducting with solar entrepreneurs shows that two of the biggest barriers to scaling up access to renewable energy in rural areas are the lack of finance and of distribution networks. The Energy for All Partnership will support an initial phase of six working groups – on domestic biogas, solar lanterns, liquid petroleum gas (LPG), financing for energy services, energy enterprise development, and the Pacific region – that will design and implement programs in high-impact areas such as increasing microfinance lending for energy investments, or replicating business models for private sector service delivery.

This investment portfolio looks promising. Christine Eibs-Singer, CEO of E+Co and co-chair of partnership’s steering committee, emphasized the need for increasing collaboration between existing efforts in order to yield a greater impact. “Many organizations, from the multilateral to the local, are helping bring energy access to vulnerable communities,” she said, and framed the work of this donor-led partnership as leveraging the work of partner organizations for greater impact and wider benefits.

Next Wednesday (June 24th) I will be facilitating a workshop designed for the AVINA Foundation at Tällberg, Sweden, on the day before the kick-off of the Tällberg Forum. AVINA’s International Bridge Building efforts are demonstrating the effective role that philanthropic foundations can play in building critical mass to scale up the impact of social and environmental entrepreneurs. AVINA is currently helping some of its partners develop initiatives of continental scale and ambition.These include:

• an “Amazon Regional Alliance”, led by Martín von Hildebrand of the Fundacion Gaia Amazonas, which is bringing together neighboring countries and leaders in a joint conservation effort;
• a “Latin American Climate Platform”, which is linking business, policy-makers and environmentalists throughout the region, facilitated by the Quito-based Fundacion Futuro Latinoamericano;
• a continental network of sustainable cities, led by Oded Grajew, the business leader founder of the Instituto Ethos in Brazil, and one of the founders of the World Social Forum.

The session, with 60+ participants, is bringing these and other leaders together with European and global investors, philanthropic foundations and global action networks to spark strategic relationships and explore the collaborative potential to embark in joint initiatives and create ecosystems for change.

At the meeting, Anders Wikjman, Member of the European Parliament, environmental leader and Vice-President of Tällberg Foundation, will infuse participants with possibilities for creating global cooperation partnerships; and Simon Lyster, Executive Director of Leadership for the Environment and Development (LEAD) will share LEAD’s experience and results in mobilizing global-local networks.

At this year’s Tällberg Forum we are organizing seven other workshops on pathways to scale in partnership with Tällberg’s ‘Rework’ initiative, which I’ll report on separately.

In the short term, South Korea has adopted a “Green New Deal” policy to tackle the global economic crisis, a combination of neo-classical supply-side economic policy aimed at creating jobs and revitalizing the economy. For the longer term, Korea will be spending roughly US$ 40 billion over the next four years, which will create 960,000 jobs. A new five-year development plan focused on low-carbon green growth is being finalized, which is perhaps the first of its kind in the world.

“Since the 1960s, Korea has been very successful in industrial development, which was led by five-year industrial plans,” said Kim Hyung-Kook, Chairman, Presidential Committee on Green Growth, Republic of Korea. “We will follow the same model, but under a new and completely new paradigm of low-carbon green growth. In early July this year, we will be seeing the early draft, which will be reported to the president.”

China is also counting on environmental initiatives for future economic growth as well, said Victor L. L. Chu, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, First Eastern Investment Group, Hong Kong SAR. “In terms of energy intensity, which is the amount of energy required to generate one unit of GDP, China has dropped 75% over the last 20 years and is still looking very aggressively to achieve more efficiency. Nearly 40% of China’s 4 trillion renminbi stimulus package is green project related.” He added that “China, Korea and Japan can work together to find some win-win solutions for us in the region and on a global basis.”

Tarek Sultan Al Essa, Chairman and Managing Director, Agility, Kuwait, said the Middle East also has a green vision. “When the government of Abu Dhabi, one of the most well-endowed petroleum-based economies, announces that it’s turning to nuclear power and building a carbon-neutral city from scratch, everybody needs to take a step back and realize the enormity of what that is saying,” he said. His company, which provides logistics and supply chain services, is increasingly getting questions from customers about green programmes. “The next logical step is that [environmental initiatives] will be more and more incorporated into our customers’ decision-making processes.”

Information technology can help accelerate the greening of Asian growth, said Chiaki Ito, Vice-Chairman, Fujitsu, Japan, pointing out that computers can help consumers measure and visualize their energy consumption and carbon emissions in real time and thus do something about them. “But to fundamentally solve global warming, we need not only to advance technology but also to change our mind with a new world view,” he said. “We need to change our life and business styles and not only seek material wealth.”

“Typically, in other downturns, environmental issues had been put aside,” noted Robert Greenhill, Managing Director and Chief Business Officer of the World Economic Forum. “That does not seem to be the case with this downturn. Obviously key policy issues – not only in terms of international commitments but also in pricing and fiscal incentives – are key elements, and it appears that governments from China, Korea and Japan are playing a key part in that.” The corporate sector is also strongly committed and engaged, he said. “This is an opportunity to make even more efficient the market for the exchange of best practices, not only in terms of technologies, but also in terms of know-how and the application of these technologies across different sectors.”

All of the above comes from a WEF media release. For more information, see here.  Let’s see how all of these commitments play out in practice! When we founded SustainAbility in 1987, our strap-line was ‘The Green Growth Company’, so it’s nice to see the language in wider use. But launching Green New Deals is one thing, executing them in an efficient, effective and timely fashion quite another.

The Rotary Youth Social Entrepreneurship Challenge 2009 (RYSEC 2009) opens for submissions from Singapore-based teams TODAY. RYSEC is organised by the Rotary Club of Singapore, SYINC and Volans.

Teams of 2-5 budding young social entrepreneurs (between the age of 19-30) are invited to apply, with cash prizes being awarded as well as an all-expenses paid week-long social entrepreneurship study trip to Cambodia. For more details on the competition, please go to http://www.rysec.sg.