![\"bill](\"http:\/\/www.simra-h2020.eu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/bill-slee-150x150.jpg\")
<\/p>\nI have recently been involved in some work with the ENRD Contact Point in a meeting on innovation and LEADER, in preparing an article for their magazine and I am currently preparing for another ENRD meeting about the new business opportunities associated with social innovation in rural Europe.<\/p>\n
This preparation and working for SIMRA has made me think long and hard about how we let rather out of date dualities between private and public sector guide our thinking about the nature of \u201cbusiness\u201d in the rural economy and the place of social innovation in delivering beneficial change.<\/p>\n
Take an example of the unambiguously defined private sector: a European family farm.\u00a0 In many years, its income will be less than its total receipt of Pillar 1 payments.\u00a0 Public money is the lifeblood of the farm sector.\u00a0 When we consider a group of farmers in say an environmental cooperative, this voluntary association creates something that seems more like a social enterprise.\u00a0 Yet this too will almost certainly be underpinned by European RDP or sometimes state or regional money.<\/p>\n
Take a look at a typical municipality.\u00a0 It runs education, social care services, waste management and so on.\u00a0 Or does it?\u00a0 I took this photo a few weeks ago of a primary school sign in England.<\/p>\n
Academies are the product of a national initiative to quasi-privatise what had been a municipal service.\u00a0 But this example of a privatised school is a co-operative.\u00a0 So here we find public, private and cooperative entities in one hybrid form.\u00a0 And we look around a bit further into the countryside \u00a0and we find farmers benefitting from snow clearing or grass cutting contracts with local authorities; we find communities taking on the management of social care, which had been public sector, then was privatised and now is transitioning into something else.\u00a0 We find energy production which had been state owned, then was privatised, but now with many examples of cooperative and community provision.\u00a0 The mayoral candidate for Birmingham, England\u2019s second largest city, who is expected to win an imminent election, is committed to mutualising many municipal services, morphing them into not for profit organisations. \u00a0\u00a0Hybridity seems to be the new normal.<\/p>\n
The last two decades have witnessed a remarkable growth of social enterprises and other voluntary associations and collaborative groups.\u00a0 This is the third sector which has been around a long time but is becoming more prominent.\u00a0 Community ownership of land and renewable energy installations and social entrepreneurship have flourished in an era of public sector austerity and economic recession.<\/p>\n
What appears to be happening is that the old categories of public, private and third sector have become almost outdated by new practices.\u00a0 Often the practice seems to be ahead of the theory.\u00a0 In SIMRA we need to be alert to this emergent hybridity and hopefully explore some of the more interesting examples of these hybrid forms in our case studies.<\/p>\n
Author:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Bill Slee<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have recently been involved in some work with the ENRD Contact Point in a meeting on innovation and LEADER, in preparing an article for their magazine and I am currently preparing for another ENRD meeting about the new business opportunities associated with social innovation in rural Europe. This preparation and working for SIMRA has…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1048,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simra-h2020.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simra-h2020.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simra-h2020.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simra-h2020.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simra-h2020.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1046"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.simra-h2020.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1052,"href":"http:\/\/www.simra-h2020.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046\/revisions\/1052"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simra-h2020.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simra-h2020.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simra-h2020.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simra-h2020.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}