‘I Want to Change That!’: Tactical Responses to Challenges within Sustainable Entrepreneurship

With ecological degradation moving up the global political agenda, sustainable entrepreneurship has been proposed as an engine towards achieving a greener economy. In this article, I delve into the tensions, challenges and dilemmas confronting sustainable entrepreneurs, but also explore the tactics available to them for developing entrepreneurial responses. Inspired by scholars that emphasize the everyday, contextual and processual aspects of entrepreneurship, the article considers sustainable entrepreneurship as the use of multiple tactics to cope with environmental, social and economic problems. To develop this view, the article takes the case of green architecture. Here I explore three different entrepreneurial tactics used by actors to develop green architecture in the construction industry. Instead of situating sustainable entrepreneurship as an effort to arrive at solutions to environmental challenges, the article suggests that the processes involved in such efforts might warrant greater attention. As such, we could benefit from shifting the perspective from the results to the process of sustainable entrepreneurship.