REFLECTIONS ON POVERTY SOLUTIONS OFFERED BY INTRODUCING SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP TO ECOSYSTEM SERVICES

Abstract

The new economy which characterizes today’s world is invaded by countless theories and concepts which try to explain the way societies fail to assure a general well-being for citizens and wish to offer support for the development of a flourishing and safe future. Between these concepts, some new and some old, are the social entrepreneurship and the ecosystem services. Both of these have started to become very important for researchers and policy makers in the last decade. Also, both have the objective of creating a more human economy and assuring the human well-being. Even though the subjects of these theories are very different, we have managed to show in this paper that a correlation between the two is possible and more than that their combination can have positive outcomes. Social entrepreneurship is a concept describing a new way of using business know-how gained from the private sector in order to find solutions to social, cultural and environmental problems. Ecosystem services are the benefits which people obtain from ecosystems. A relation between the two concepts can be represented by the fact that ecosystem services might be the subject of social entrepreneurship. Another one would be the input which social entrepreneurship might bring to ecosystem services, in what concerns abilities and techniques in dealing with different problems. In conclusion, we tried to show that these double way relations would have an important role in what concerns the fight against poverty.