Empowering environmental entrepreneurs in the Global South? The case of a Sustainable Building Incubator in Phnom Penh

Abstract

Sustainability-driven entrepreneurship is increasingly considered a crucial way of transforming systems of consumption and production towards sustainability. Entrepreneurial support organizations like incubators have proliferated, and increasingly appear in the Global South. However, there is limited understanding about how these programmes in their role as intermediaries empower participants to actively engage in the transformation towards an environmentally and socially sustainable economy. Knowledge is particularly scarce for innovation contexts outside the Global North, where major sustainability challenges and limited funding intersect. The objective of the article is therefore to assess the empowerment effects of an incubation programme in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and provide insights for designing ecopreneurship incubation programmes in Southern settings. Building on data from ex-ante and ex-post participant surveys, the study integrates different empowerment dimensions including resources, social capital, intrinsic motivation, social learning and process design. The results show overall increased empowerment levels and a correlation between social capital increase and increased willingness. We however also found ambivalent results with negative effects for individual motivational effects including impact and competence. Incubation programmes must account for such disempowering tendencies to realize their transformative goals.