Accelerating Sustainability through Human Development. Managing the complexity of supporting social enterprises toward the implementation of sustainable development

Accelerator programs that support enterprises in their early stages are growing in numbers, acknowledged by many as an important organizational form for achieving economic growth. However, focusing solely on economic growth has proven to be detrimental for the environment and not enough to solve the challenges of our current social systems. As a response, accelerators and social enterprises that focus on creating social and environmental value have started to appear. This thesis applies a transdisciplinary research process; collaborating with a social enterprise accelerator called SoPact, located in Helsingborg, Sweden. The aim of the thesis is to test the applicability of Sen’s Human Development as a sustainability paradigm within their existing goals and tools in order to support emerging social enterprises toward the achievement of sustainable development. The three main findings are as follow: (1) The operation of SoPact allows for an integration of Sen’s sustainability paradigm achieved through an analysis of what objective capabilities are required to be prioritized. (2) The framework of SoPact can be transformed in order to transmit this integration effectively to emerging social enterprises. (3) The transformation allows social enterprises to effectively relate their operation to global goals such as the Sustainability Development Goals and to local ones such as Helsingborg City’s goals. Nevertheless, there are certain pre-conditions to achieve these results, mostly related with the funding and goals of SoPact. This resulted in a generalizable conclusion that implies that in order for social enterprises and their accelerators to succeed, the goals of their collaborators and supporters must also be in line with social and environmental goals. The paper also concluded that through transdisciplinary research, it is possible to find the possibilities and limitations of integrating Sen’s Human Development as sustainability paradigm in the context of a given accelerator