Social entrepreneurship, and the technopolitics of millennial development in Cape Town

Abstract

In Cape Town, as in many other cities of the Global South, a range of new developmental experiments have emerged around the idea that, by empowering entrepreneurs, poverty can be fought with profit. Social enterprises, for example, are being promoted by global institutions as organisations that, by seeking both financial profit and social good, are ideal vehicles for meeting the demands of contemporary development. As a result, local authorities, NGOs, and other developmental agencies have all embraced social entrepreneurship as one of the devices that have the capacity to yield market solutions to poverty. Bringing together insights from postcolonial human geography and critical ethnography, this research examines how social entrepreneurship functions as a political technology of 'millennial development', by tracing the experiments through which ingrained issues such as racialised poverty and urban marginality are framed as domains of entrepreneurial innovation. Hence this work asks: what does seeing social entrepreneurship as a system of developmental expertise reveal about the claim that social enterprises are empowering? What kind of technical and political regimes are mobilised, invented, and experimented to address economic marginality in a postcolonial, post-apartheid city? To address these questions, this dissertation follows a network of very diverse sites of expertise, where social entrepreneurship is put into action in material ways. The empirical core of this research combines ethnographic and interview material gathered between March and November 2015. Drawing on fieldnotes and documentary evidence, this dissertation argues that it is through tentative, material and failure-ridden experiments that social entrepreneurship becomes a viable technology of development expertise. The findings of this research also show that the technopolitics of millennial development in Cape Town are not only centred around finding market solutions to poverty. Social entrepreneurship, while opening new frontiers for capitalist expansion, is also a terrain of diverse opportunities, where distinct technical, economic, and ethical regimes are cultivated. This dissertation thus concludes that examining social entrepreneurship as a political technology reveals its spatial, material and performative qualities in reproducing the promises of millennial development, as well as the possibility for alternative politics of entrepreneurial empowerment.

Date of Award	2018
Original language	English