Building community-based social enterprises in the Philippines : diverse development pathways

Community-based social enterprises offer a new strategy for people-centred local economic development in the majority ‘developing’ world. In this chapter we recount the stories of four social enterprise experiments that have arisen over the last five years from partnerships between communities, NGOs and municipal governments in the Philippines and university-based researchers from Australia. The concept of social enterprise coming out of the ‘Western’ social economy context is relatively unfamiliar in Asia. In practice, however, social enterprises, in the form of co-operatives, have long played a central role in rural development in countries like the Philippines. Moreover many customary, indigenous, traditional and local practices of mutual assistance form a social economy ‘on the ground’ that provides well-being and an informal social safety net for millions of people. We argue here that community-based social enterprise development that builds on local forms of social economy has much to offer, especially as mainstream economic development options are failing to narrow the gap between rich and poor.