Mind over matter : essays on policy resistance and unexpected outcomes in environmental entrepreneurship
(2024)
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- Abstract
- Environmental entrepreneurship studies how firms can simultaneously pursue economic and environmental objectives through the development of green products, services, or business models. In line with the broader field of entrepreneurship, it examines the nature of opportunities, the characteristics of entrepreneurs, and the outcomes associated with such efforts. However, the majority of research has focused on the entrepreneur-opportunity nexus, with limited emphasis on actual environmental outcomes and a focus on intermediate proxies such as firm entry, market creation and product adoption instead. Moreover, while historical patterns suggest that innovations to address an environmental problem often create new, more complex ones, environmental entrepreneurship is commonly understood as being inherently beneficial. This dissertation relaxes this assumption and explores its potential for unintended consequences through the lens of policy resistance, denoting how well-intentioned interventions fail due to a mismatch between the mental models used to make decisions and the complex realities in which they interfere. By analyzing the role of delayed, distant, and feedback effects, this research extends the literature on outcomes in environmental entrepreneurship by moving beyond intermediate proxies, like firm entry, market creation and product adoption. Moreover, the focus of this dissertation on the unexpected consequences of well-intentioned interventions is complementary to corporate inaction and greenwashing, which have been the focus for explaining limited progress towards environmental goals in the corporate sustainability literature. More broadly, the dissertation contributes to the discussion of how theories can become counterproductive in practice and positions policy resistance as a gradual and actionable approach to develop systems thinking capabilities.
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Citations
Cossey, J. (2024). Mind over matter : essays on policy resistance and unexpected outcomes in environmental entrepreneurship. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/237102