Environmentally-driven community entrepreneurship: Mapping the link between natural environment, local community and entrepreneurship

Local initiatives that address environmental issues are determined by the shared territory, history and culture of community members, which can lead to common values and goals. This paper focuses on the role of community-based entrepreneurship in protecting and managing the natural environment that impacts directly life quality of local residents, as social and natural systems manifest and evolve in a dynamic interdependence. We apply a case study methodology to capture the richness of community-based entrepreneurship and evidence the diversity of these initiatives. By presenting and analyzing three case studies on different types of environmentally-driven initiatives - considering the natural environment as an object, context or resource of entrepreneurial activities, we identify the main elements of community entrepreneurship and the factors influencing its manifestations. These elements are integrated into a synthetic model, which maps the relationships between various components and success factors of environmentally-driven community initiatives. Our findings provide a better understanding of community-based entrepreneurship and of the hidden mechanisms of collective initiative and action.