ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with issues concerning the current and potential role of green social enterprises in promoting solutions to the challenges of achieving sustainable welfare. Human welfare requires the production of goods and services for the satisfaction of human needs. The chapter provides a critical overview of social enterprises, relating the rise and proliferation of the concept and associated phenomena to broader shifts in politics and political economy. Social economy has been experiencing a renaissance as socio-ecological challenges, combined with recent and ongoing experiences of totalitarian, oligarchic or plutocratic states, predatory capital and combinations of these, have spurred interest in alternatives. The remarkable rise of social enterprises and social entrepreneurship must be understood against the backdrop of decades of neoliberalization, which has brought rising and ostensibly permanent unemployment, austerity politics, the dismantling of welfare institutions and the outsourcing of public services, rampant financialization and seemingly intractable problems in the wake of severe economic, social and environmental crises.
