March saw the fifth annual Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship. John Elkington was there
The question brought us all up short. What, someone asked recently at the first Tällberg Conversation in London, would the global sustainability movement do if the call came to enter government and take over the reins of power?
When communism collapsed, this is exactly what we saw in eastern Europe. People who had been on the margins found themselves projected into high office. But the questioner in London did not get an immediate answer, even though his question is an excellent one.
Tällberg convenes annually and addresses the question: how on earth can we live together? As we talked, part of my brain tried to work out an answer, concluding that there is no blueprint for adapting our economies and societies to meet the new social, economic and environmental imperatives. Perhaps the people who get closest to drawing up a strategy are the social and environmental entrepreneurs whose ambition, energy and achievements were evident at the fifth Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, held at Oxford's Saïd Business School in March.
As eBay co-founder Jeff Skoll introduced Al Gore as a speaker, he recalled the foreword the former US vice-president wrote for the 1992 edition of Rachel Carson's paradigm-shifting book Silent Spring, first published in 1962. At the time, said Skoll, Carson was described as hysterical by the chemical industry and even some of her scientific colleagues. In the same way, many of the social and environmental entrepreneurs assembled in Oxford have been called crazy because they propose solutions to problems most people see as insoluble.
But the focus is shifting to a set of high-potential, high-leverage solutions that will require close partnerships between entrepreneurs, business and financial institutions, government agencies and the increasingly powerful public.
No single group of people is going to ride in and save the planet. But at least social entrepreneurs and their counterparts inside major corporations are working on some of the key things we should be doing, whether or not the call ever comes.
John Elkington is co-founder of SustainAbility (www.sustainability.com) and a founding partner of Volans Ventures (www.volans.com)
