Sustainable entrepreneurship and the Sustainable Development Goals: Community-led initiatives, the social solidarity economy and commons ecologies

The social solidarity economy is an approach to the production and consumption of goods, services and knowledge that promises to address contemporary economic, social and environmental crises more effectively than business as usual. The paper employs the concept of commons ecologies to examine the practices, relationships and interactions among actors and organisations in the social solidarity economy, as well as between them and the mainstream economy, which shape the field and its degree of autonomy in relation to capitalism, through a process defined as boundary commoning. Such process shapes both local and regional commons ecologies, as well as the participation of local and regional actors in wider networks at national, international and global levels. The paper takes a case study-based approach to identify practices, relationships and interactions of commons ecologies in relation to selected community-led initiatives in the UK, Portugal, Brazil and Senegal. Each case study illuminates different qualities of local/regional commons ecologies and their forms of engagement with wider networks. Further, the paper shows that these cases demonstrate how the social solidarity economy may facilitate delivery of the Sustainable Development Goals in a distinctive way. In each case, SSE acts as a vehicle for expressing participants' values and principles consistent with those underlying the SDGs. Local implementation of SDGs is thus an in-built feature of these commons ecologies. The participation of community-led initiatives in international and global networks offers opportunities to learn from local level experiences and successes, potentially strengthening SDG implementation more generally.

. This paper examines the scope for balancing the implementation of these differently oriented SDGs through social solidarity economy (henceforth SSE)-based strategies that combine regenerative ecology with the promotion of postgrowth livelihoods based on cooperative approaches to production, commercialisation and consumption (see Ridley-Duff & Bull, 2020). The paper addresses key aspects of this Special Issue involving attention to the substantive rather than definitional qualities of sustainable or regenerative entrepreneurship (Muñoz, Janssen, Nicolopoulou, & Hockerts, 2018) (Roland & Landua, 2013). These issues extend to how to transcend the preoccupation with trade-offs between ecological, social and economic goals that has been typical of research on sustainable entrepreneurship to date (as noted by Muñoz & Cohen, 2018;cf. Schaltegger & Wagner, 2011;Shepherd & Patzelt, 2011;cf. Genus, Iskandarova, & Warburton Brown, 2020).
The empirical focus of the paper is on how particular forms of SSE arising within movements of community-led initiatives (CLIs) for sustainability and social justice facilitate the delivery of SDGs.
The analysis employs the concept of commons ecologies and examines processes of boundary commoning. Both commons ecologies and boundary commoning have received little attention within the research literature to date. The concept of commons ecologies emphasises the self-organised and highly democratic nature of CLIs and the conceptual and practical interdependency among social and ecological outcomes that characterises their work. Commons ecologies are local networks of commons, purposely interconnected so as to promote positive environmental and social outcomes (de Angelis, 2017, p. 22).
The paper employs the concept of commons ecologies to examine the practices, relationships and interactions among actors and organisations in the social and solidarity economy, as well as between them and the mainstream economy, which shape the field and its degree of autonomy in relation to capitalism, through a process defined as boundary commoning. 'Boundary commoning' (de Angelis, 2017) is understood as a synergistic relationship among commons-based enterprises, and between commons-based and profit-led enterprises, that maximise their autonomy in relation to capitalism's isomorphic pressures. Fundamentally, such commoning 'opens up the boundaries [of commons systems], establishes the connections and sustains commons ecologies [and] could reshape existing institutions from the ground up' (de Angelis, 2017, p. 24). This paper analyses how the concept of common ecologies brings into focus distinctive features of the ways CLIs mobilise SSE as a vehicle for action both within and between commons. In doing so, the paper advances the argument that CLIs and their SSE activities are not just powerful vehicles for SDG implementation but also offer alternative framings and understandings that can enable improvements in SDG conceptualisation and implementation more widely. Consideration of CLIs and SSE activities based on an appreciation of commons ecologies and boundary commoning can enrich and extend our understanding of sustainable entrepreneurship as collective action and the relevance of local practice to global objectives and initiatives.
The institutionalisation of the SDGs has provided new possibilities for linking the aspirations and activities of CLIs with those of governments and intergovernmental bodies. Based on long-term experience of practical action towards linked environmental and social goals, in some cases over several decades, the actions and achievements of CLIs prefigure, at local and/or regional scales, wider SDG implementation (Penha-Lopes & Henfrey, 2019). Some CLIs have adopted the SDGs as an explicit framework to advance and evaluate preexisting work. However, CLIs often question key structural conditions that are taken for granted in the SDGs as currently articulated and framed. In particular, the pervasive and growing influence of postgrowth thinking (Jackson, 2017;Kallis, 2018;Raworth, 2017) leads many CLIs, and their networks, to problematise the position of economic growth, both as a goal in itself (SDG8) and as a framing condition for achieving other goals (Penha-Lopes & Henfrey, 2019). SSE thus becomes a vehicle through which CLIs seek to explore approaches framed within different social, economic and political assumptions (Asara, Profumi, & Kallis, 2013;Fullerton, 2015). CLIs bring to this great depth of hands-on practical experience developed largely outside of or in isolation from conventional institutions (Penha-Lopes & Henfrey, 2019). Accordingly, the alternative practices, relationships and interactions deployed by CLIs, through SSE, in working towards the SDGs, can be a great source of insights into the relevance of commons ecologies for wider SDG implementation.

| LITERATURE REVIEW
An underexplored aspect of the SDGs concerns the interrelationships among their social, economic and ecological dimensions and the implications for the governance of CLIs, namely, in what regards property regimes, task allocation and cross-scale exchanges between initiatives nested in different scales of the social and solidarity economy (Cox, Arnold, & Villamayor Tomás, 2010;Marshall, 2018;Ostrom, 1990;Peredo, Haugh, & McLean, 2018). The argument here is that 1 The UN Sustainable Development Goals are listed on the United Nations website (at https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/). integration of social, economic and ecological aspects can be promoted by systemic approaches based on creating synergies among different scales of CLIs.
The basic premises of this approach are twofold. First, that commons provide a necessary alternative to market-based and state-led action towards the SDGs because, by nature, they integrate environmental and social concerns (De Angelis, 2017). Second, that SSE's potential to contribute to delivery of the SDGs arises largely because SSE can help commons to exist and flourish despite the predominance, and favouring by governments, of capitalist organisations with limited potential to deliver beneficial social and environmental outcomes (Gibson-Graham, 2006Laville, 2016;Mendell, 2009). This approach stands in contrast with much work within sustainable entrepreneurship, which concerns the problem of trade-offs that individual entrepreneurs are supposed to make among competing social, environmental and economic objectives (op. cit.). In making this argument, the paper employs commons ecologies as a holding concept that captures the essential general features of CLIs, their distinctive approaches to SSE, and the constructive critique of the SDGs these approaches enact.
Commons, a form of socio-economic organisation in which users self-organise for collective management of shared resources, take diverse forms and are an accepted alternative to market, state and their various hybrids (Ostrom, 1990(Ostrom, , 2005 Berkes, Feeny, McCay, and Acheson (1989) distinguish between open access, private, communal property and state governance types of rights regimes in which commons resources may be held. One may distinguish open access commons at the centre of Hardin's (1968) 'tragedy' from communal property resources, over which an identified community exercises control over who has access to the common resource and the rules governing and monitoring its use, including penalties for misuse or overuse (Berkes et al., 1989). Elinor Ostrom's (1990Ostrom's ( , 2005 work, for which she won a Nobel Prize in economics, conceived of commons as 'social institutions'. Here, social relationships play just as important a role in economic systems as impersonal market transactions (Bollier, 2016, p. 6). Recently, there has been growing concern with commons as political engagement, emphasising the practice(s) of 'commoning' within living social systems inhabited by creative agents (Cox et al., 2010;Marshall, 2018;Mendell, 2009). This more political view highlights the transformation of economic systems, so that they meet social need rather than consumer demand. Bollier (2016) argues that for the commons movement to develop institutions fit for a 'postcapitalist, postgrowth order' requires different human capacities; innovative social forms; access to financing/credit; open knowledge and networking technology and possibly a 'commons-friendly' partner state (Gibson-Graham, 2006Laville, 2016;Mendell, 2009).
Extensive empirical research has shown traditional commons, which still support the livelihoods of the majority of the world's population, to be a necessary (but not sufficient) feature of all documented cases of sustainability and resilience in social-ecological systems (Berkes, 1990;Berkes & Folke, 1998). CLIs have, through conscious imitation or convergence based on the structural limitations of both state-led and market-led approaches, widely adopted commons as a medium of organisation and action (Henfrey & Kenrick, 2017;Penha-Lopes & Henfrey, 2019). CLIs are self-organised initiatives of people working together towards some defined set of environmental and/or social goals and most identify themselves with defined localities or communities of place (Penha-Lopes & Henfrey, 2019). Many also form part of translocal movements that seek to strengthen local action via networking, collective learning, pooling and sharing resources and mutual support (Avelino, Dumitru, Cipolla, Kunze, & Wittmayer, 2019). Although 'community' is identified as the key locus of action, its existence may be an outcome of rather than precondition for such action, and such initiatives in any case change the nature of the communities that undertake them. CLIs arise and operate independently of government but often seek to collaborate with local government and/or seek to influence policy (Esteves, 2017;Penha-Lopes & Henfrey, 2019).
Commons ecologies demonstrate this focus on relationships in two key ways. First, they prioritise local and regional (especially bioregional) level organisation of production and consumption. Such 'short circuit' approaches seek to structure chains of production, supply, consumption and disposal on a human scale, maximising use of local resources (natural and human) and ensuring the impacts (positive and negative) of production and consumption are experienced by those directly involved (Douthwaite, 1996). From the point of view of specific projects and enterprises, this means the effects on SDG implementation (whether activities enhance or conflict with delivery of one or more SDGs) are visible, creating feedback loops through which enterprises can modify their activities in order better to serve the SDGs (De Angelis, 2017; Douthwaite, 1996). At the level of the regional economy, the effect is to reconfigure the societal metabolism in ways that are more amenable to SDG delivery (Cato, 2013). Second, they place greater emphasis on nonmaterial (and nonmarketised) assets and, in particular, nurture and make effective use of social, human and (renewable and/or regenerated) natural capital in order to support high quality of life on the basis of relatively low levels of material consumption (Hall, 2015). This creates many natural synergies among different SDGs, more difficult to achieve in socioeconomic models that assume correlation between wellbeing and material affluence.
Commons ecologies are a necessary feature of SSE, organisations and practices of which are in isolation vulnerable to capitalism's isomorphic pressures (Estivil, 2018). In other words, market forces and regulatory pressures induce enterprises to prioritise market over social and environmental concerns (Dey, 2014;Estivil, 2018;Mason, 2012;Roy, Sato, & Calò, 2015). These pressures can be overcome through forms of 'boundary commoning' (de Angelis, 2017): synergistic relationships among commons-based enterprises, and between commons-based and profit-led enterprises, that maximise their autonomy in relation to capitalism's isomorphic pressures. A preponderance of such interrelationships among commons in a single locality leads to a form of social power that instead subverts and constrains traditional business models (Bauwens & Niaros, 2017).

| METHOD
Based on the above review, the paper seeks to answer three research questions, which are set out as follows: i. What is the nature of commons systems implicated with CLIs that contribute to achieving SDGs?
ii. What processes enable the boundary commoning required to build commons ecologies relevant to the SSE?
iii. How do the answers to the above questions inform sustainable development-related policy-making and research on CLIs?
The paper adopts a case study approach to answering the research questions posed in the previous paragraph. Four case study examples are selected for their potential to illustrate features of commons ecologies and processes of commoning and contribute to SDGs.
The characteristics of commons systems are drawn from previous literature and include self-organisation; the prevalence of nested units; shared practices; shared values and emphasis on interdependent social and ecological outcomes (see Table 1 for a summary of how the case studies exemplify these characteristics). The case studies identify features of boundary commoning required to build commons ecologies (see Table 2 and 'fair shares' (Burnett, 2008;Mollison & Slay, 1994). Its core methodology is to apply principles observed to promote self-organisation and resilience in 'natural' ecosystems in the deliberate design of social and social-ecological systems (Holmgren, 2002). The aim is that these designed systems support people's needs in ways that maximise their ecological value and require minimal ongoing maintenance. This is achieved by deliberately fostering mutually beneficial relationships among elements in the system, maximising alignment between the needs of each and design goals for the system itself. This emphasis on maximising self-generative potentially through appropriate interrelationship makes permaculture an exemplary strategy for the promotion of commons ecologies.
Permaculture has an inherent connection with the SDGs, in multiple types of spatial arrangement (Henfrey & Penha-Lopes, 2015 The survey identified some detailed characteristics of permaculture-inspired enterprises. About one third of responding businesses were community or social enterprises or charities. These enterprises are durable; more than half of businesses in the survey had been in operation for 5 years or longer and more than a quarter for over 10 years. In relation to gender equality and female empowerment (SDG5), nearly half of the businesses (45%) are owned by women, consistent with relatively high female representation in leadership positions in the UK permaculture movement as a whole (see Henfrey, 2014). Twenty-five per cent of businesses surveyed employed more than one member of the same family. However, in keeping with findings from other research that show low ethnic diversity in many segments of the permaculture movement (Ferguson & Lovell, 2015), only two businesses (about 5%) were owned by someone from a minority ethnic background.
The KEEP interviews show that permaculture enterprises may be Tamera developed the 'Healing Biotope' model as the result of a deliberate strategy to establish a regional level commons ecology that integrates SSE enterprises into self-regenerative economic and ecological circuits of value via strategic promotion of water, energy and food autonomy (SDG16). This happens through ecosystem management strategies based on permaculture (SDG15), use of renewable energy technologies (SDG7) and development of a regional food autonomy network (SDG2) (Esteves, 2017). Tamera residents share water and energy produced within the community's boundaries and organic food grown either on the community's own land or within an emerging regional food autonomy network based on exchanges between intentional communities and small-and medium-sized organic and biodynamic producers in the region. This is supported by use of permaculture for ecological regeneration, low carbon architecture and use of off-grid renewable energy sources (Esteves, 2017 with the productive capacity of the regional food autonomy network (SDG12) (Esteves, 2017). According to data from the EU-funded ORIGIN research project, 5 over the course of 2015 Tamera produced 45% of its electricity consumption from onsite renewable resources.
Its goal is to achieve complete energy autonomy and self-sufficiency during the following decade.
Since 2007, the community has also been moving towards water and food autonomy, developing a regenerative methodology for land management and food production known as a water retention landscape (WRL). A WRL recovers eroded soils for farming through construction of a system of lakes, ponds, terraces and other features that maximise retention of rainwater (Holzer, 2011). In Tamera, WRL supports numerous ecological functions that link SSE to various SDGs: autonomous water supply (SDG6); food production (SDG2) and regeneration of topsoil, pasture and forest and local enrichment of biodiversity (SDG15) (Anderson, 2011). Members of Tamera's Ecology Team reported that through this strategy Tamera became self-sufficient in water supply and management in 2009 (Esteves, 2017). External assessment of Tamera's WRL suggests that it increases the capacity of the soil to return water to the atmosphere through evapotranspiration (SDG13) (Kravcik, Pokorny, & Kohutiar, 2008).
The activities of the intentional community based at Tamera thus support development of a commons ecology at two nested, interdependent levels. Within the community itself, it supports radical innovation for sustainable production and consumption in ways basic to residents' lifestyles and livelihoods. In the wider region, by promoting linkages among enterprises in ecologically and economically regenerative circuits of value that support emergence of a regional SSE, it spreads those innovations more widely, contributing in significant ways to multiple SDGs.

| Esperança/Cooesperança
An example from Brazil shows how distinct social movements con-  This project is a source of best practices that have become a template for similar initiatives worldwide, especially in Latin America and Europe. One of the most notable cases is the yearly Solidarity Economy Fair organised by Xarxa d'Economia Solidària de Catalunya (Catalan Network of Solidarity Economy), supported both directly by the Barcelona municipality and via regional-level public policies promoted by the Catalan government (Generalitat). 6 These markets use public spaces to commercialise the products of organised groups of small-scale farmers and artisans who were previously largely isolated from markets by a combination of globalised supply chains and regulatory requirements that restrict their access to commercial licences.
Such strategies do far more than provide a source of income for participants: they also create commons ecologies that support forms of mobilisational citizenship (Escoffier, 2018). Concretely, they make visi- Over 3 years, GE, in collaboration with international and regional experts, conducted a series of capacity-building activities in permaculture, agroforestry and food processing. Agroforestry practices regenerated the fragile ecosystem by storing carbon, preventing deforestation, increasing biodiversity, protecting water resources and reducing erosion (SDG15 and SDG6). Throughout its life, the project has promoted the full and active participation of women, who were its main implementers and beneficiaries (SDG5). Women made the initial decisions about which land to use and crops to plant and were given roles that ensured equal access in power structures; whenever possible, female tutors were identified.
In 3

| DISCUSSION
The case studies presented in this paper are from diverse geographical (urban and rural), social, cultural and economic settings. They never- mutual support via their participation in regional enterprise ecologies and networks of action learning and strategic collaborations at or among local, regional, national, international and global scales. At Tamera ecovillage, these principles are integrated into the daily life of the residential community and regional networks of cooperation among SSE actors within and outside the community, making SDG implementation an embedded feature of local and regional economies. The case studies best fit the communal type of property rights regime (Berkes et al., 1989). What the case studies demonstrate is that CLIs can govern commons to afford socially just as well as ecologically mindful use and, they would say, regeneration of resources.
They draw attention to the development of commons ecologies as living processes (Bollier, 2016) As far as issues of scaling such initiatives is concerned, the case studies illustrate how boundary commoning helps to build commons ecologies and in doing so helps to contribute to SDGs. Contrary to Bollier (2016), the CLIs in the cases do not enrol the state, and only in one is a municipality central to building a wider commons ecology.
However, the case studies do emphasise the importance of networkbased regimes to commons governance, and there is some evidence of engagement with wider processes such as those of the United Nations and contribution to SDGs.
It could be argued that the cases depict the build-up of networks of supportive partners to the commons systems discussed in the paper and that these are represented best as 'flat' interactions among partners that are enrolled in commons ecologies, rather than as hierarchical relations among actors at the 'top' and those nearer the 'bottom' level of society. Certainly, much of the debate to date regarding commons ecologies has been couched in terms of 'multilevel' governance. However, there is further discussion to be had regarding a picture based on the established and growth of commons ecologies as extending communities of practice or interest, incorporating a different perspective-or ontology-of the structure of such ecologies.
It has been recognised for some time now that 'context matters' (Armitage, 2008) and that understanding better the potential contribu- has come at the cost of co-optation of CLIs or diminution or trade-off of core socio-ecological concerns. One needs to appreciate in these cases a holistic view of society-ecology-economy that is the object of the practice of CLIs at the heart of commons ecologies, not the coexisting but distinct logics identified in previous work (De Clercq & Voronov, 2011;Muñoz & Dimov, 2015). The institutional work being undertaken by the actors in each case variously builds human, social, intellectual and economic capital required to nurture the commons system and ecology in question as commons address the complex of societal, environmental and economic challenges they face.
The cases show that diverse forms of organisation may be identified with SSE, including intentionally established eco-communities, socio-ecological movements such as permaculture, urban food networks and community development programmes. Self-organisation is a common characteristic of the initiatives presented in the paper, though one should note the prevalence of capacity development led by an external agency in the case of GE's work in Podor, Senegal, that enables participants to then undertake the actions discussed above. In all cases, the core assumptions challenge business as usual, being concerned to implement local, collective and practical actions to address integrated socio and ecological objectives. The rules of access vary for each commons system. In some, it is clear that an inclusivity/exclusivity rule is applied, such as that emphasising the participation of women or other marginalised actor or approach. In others, such rules of admission are unclear or may be absent. There is insufficient evidence regarding sanctions or penalties to be applied to rule breaking.
Across the cases, there is evidence of the importance of embedded relationships to commons ecologies and collective entrepreneurial action (cf. Muñoz & Cohen, 2018). This is shown in the alternative production/consumption chains that have been developed, for example, in connection with organic food provisioning. Relationships facilitate boundary commoning practices through which regional, national and international knowledge-and practice-sharing networks are built.
The analysis challenges policy-makers and practitioners to develop strategies for SDG implementation based on promoting localregional clusters of community initiatives/SSE enterprises and other agencies as commons ecologies in the following ways: a. by adopting regenerative approaches based on synergies between regenerative ecology and commons-based, cooperative postgrowth strategies; b. by relocalising supply chains and promoting autonomy and sovereignty in terms of water, energy and food production, so as to make SSE clusters more resilient to pressures from the mainstream economy, as well as fluctuations in availability of public funding; c. by developing context-sensitive strategies through epistemologies that combine scientific and local/traditional knowledge; and d. by strengthening and widening decision making processes to leave no one behind, particularly those who are presently unable to meaningfully participate in the decisions that impact them (UNDP, 2018).

| CONCLUSIONS
The paper addresses core concerns of this special issue of Business Strategy and the Environment pertaining to sustainable entrepreneurship and relationships among social movements, business development and SSE. The policy context of the paper refers to the attainment of, or even going beyond, the UN SDGs. In connection with developing research agenda, the paper is motivated to interrogate sustainable entrepreneurship from a perspective that embraces collective action of marginalised actors who challenge institutionalised practices and forms of social and economic organisation. Thus, the paper helps to move the topic on from definitional exercises  to address substantive issues concerning the practice of sustainable entrepreneurship and how this may be understood better.
Empirically, the paper presented four case studies with which to explore developments in SSE that have the potential to illuminate the There are several limitations to the work reported in the paper.
For instance, the comparative case study method applied was designed to explore and to illustrate the phenomenon of social and solidarity economy, primarily based on examples of CLIs. Thus, the selection of cases was nonrandom, being biased towards potentially insightful candidate cases. Moreover, the case studies were not all informed by a common approach to data collection. In addition, although the cases were drawn from different parts of the world and subject to varying local and national contextual conditions, the study was limited primarily to data that were available in English. Arguably, this limitation imparted a bias which affected the depiction and accuracy of the case studies as commons ecologies and their relevance to SDGs.
Future research could develop the exploratory work reported here. Three strands of inquiry are suggested. One strand is to conduct a more systematic, forensic analysis of community-led commons systems, to enrich understanding of different types of communal governance regimes. Relatedly, such a study could also probe more fully the boundary commoning processes which might stimulate and nurture commons ecologies, including analysis of the factors that enhance the development of capitals and anticapitalist (or possibly 'postcapitalist'; see Gibson-Graham, Cameron, & Healy, 2016), value systems and their relation to global ends such as the SDGs. 'Capitals' here emphasises knowledge, experience and cultural human capacities as well as natural phenomena which can benefit and be regenerated in commons ecologies. This is to be distinguished from conventional references to (especially financial) capitals as sources of privatised benefits.
Clearly, from the standpoint of sustainable entrepreneurship, research should seek to add to those contributions that transcend methodological individualism and instead seek to build insights into collective action in commons ecologies not reliant on the single heroic entrepreneur. As the paper has shown, such studies may be less concerned with trade-offs between sustainability goals and take greater interest in alternative, integrated paradigms, which prize the holistic and simultaneous pursuit and the regeneration of multiple social, political, economic and ecological objectives.