L. David Brown

Social Entrepreneurship and Societal Transformation An Exploratory Study

This study provides a comparative analysis of 7 cases of social entrepreneurship that have been widely recognized as successful. The article suggests factors associated with successful social entrepreneurship, particularly with social entrepreneurship that leads to significant changes in the social, political, and economic contexts for poor and marginalized groups. It generates propositions about core innovations, leadership and organization, and scaling up in social entrepreneurship that produces societal transformation. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for social entrepreneurship practice, research, and continued development.

Accountability, Strategy, and International Nongovernmental Organizations:

Increased prominence and greater influence expose international nongovernmental development and environment organizations (INGOs) to increased demands for accountability from a wide variety of stakeholders, including donors, beneficiaries, staffs, and partners. This article focuses on developing the concept of INGO accountability, first as an abstract concept and then as a strategic idea with very different implications for different INGO strategies. The authors examine implications for INGOs that emphasize service delivery, capacity building, and policy influence. They propose that INGOs committed to service delivery may owe more accountability to donors and service regulators, capacity-building INGOs may be particularly obligated to clients whose capacities are being enhanced, and policy influence INGOs may be especially accountable to political constituencies and influence targets. INGOs that are expanding their activities to include new initiatives may need to reorganize their accountability systems to implement their strategies effectively.

Social Entrepreneurship and Social Transformation: An Exploratory Study

This study provides a comparative analysis of 7 cases of social entrepreneurship that have been widely recognized as successful. The article suggests factors associated with successful social entrepreneurship, particularly with social entrepreneurship that leads to significant changes in the social, political, and economic contexts for poor and marginalized groups. It generates propositions about core innovations, leadership and organization, and scaling up in social entrepreneurship that produces societal transformation. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for social entrepreneurship practice, research, and continued development.

Support Organizations and the Evolution of the NGO Sector

This article focuses on the emergence of support organizations that play strategic roles in the evolution of development nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as a sector of civil society. We begin with a discussion of sector challenges from outside (such as public legitimacy, relations with governments, relations with businesses, and relations with international actors) and from inside (amateurism, restricted focus, material scarcity, fragmentation, and paternalism). We describe the rise of agencies to serve critical support functions, such as strengthening individual and organizational capacities, mobilizing material resources, providing information and intellectual resources, building alliances for mutual support, and building bridges across sectoral differences. Then, we examine how those organizations have solved critical problems for NGO communities, and we develop some propositions about the creation and establishment of support organizations, their strategic position, the choice to take strategic action, and how external assistance can support their strategic roles.

Framing practice-research engagement for democratizing knowledge

Practice research engagement (PRE) is increasingly important for producing knowledge and innovations in practice for complex social problem-solving. We pose several questions: Why do PRE? What is required to organize effective PRE? And what is needed for PRE to contribute to democratizing knowledge? We present a framework to encourage researchers to think systematically about organizing PRE that focuses on: 1) frameworks, goals and interests, 2) relationships and organization, 3) strategies and methods, and 4) contextual forces and institutions. We describe challenges to effective engagement posed by these elements and identify a few approaches to dealing with them. We illustrate the concept and the challenges with four case studies - Gender Relations in India; Heroin Prescriptions in Australia; Inter-sectoral Cooperation in Africa and Asia; and Building Grassroots Movements in the US. We argue that PRE that contributes to the democratization of knowledge must pay special attention to social change theories, power relations, long-term domain development strategies and building friendly institutional bases.

Constructing transnational action research networks Reflections on the Citizenship Development Research Centre

This article examines the construction of transnational action research networks that bridge local and global, practice and research, North and South, and many disciplines. Using an ‘insider—outsider’ approach the article examines the emergence of the Development Research Centre on Citizenship, Participation and Accountability as a network of partners from seven countries concerned with research, capacity building and policy influence. The article examines how this network constructed shared goals and values, developed relationships and trust, and created network architectures to support action research, policy influence and capacity building. It also explores implications of the network’s evolution for change processes, bridging leadership, mutual accountability and institutional embeddedness.