The Entrepreneurial Opium: How 'Inclusive Business' And Social Enterprise Sedate the Political Economy of the Global South

Abstract

The rapid institutionalization of "inclusive business" and social enterprise as flagship poverty-reduction strategies — championed by the World Bank, the United Nations, and the World Economic Forum — has largely escaped sustained critical scrutiny of its political consequences. This article interrogates whether these market-led models function as genuine developmental innovations or as ideological mechanisms that depoliticize structural inequality and stabilize neoliberal governance across the Global South. Moving beyond conventional impact-evaluation metrics, the study adopts a qualitative, multi-method critical political economy design combining critical discourse analysis of institutional and corporate documents with semi-structured interviews across six stakeholder categories — policymakers, corporate actors, development practitioners, community members, labour representatives, and civil society actors — yielding eighty participant accounts analysed through an eight-category coding framework (depoliticization, neoliberal governance, power asymmetry, state transformation, resistance, inclusion, precarity, and subject formation). The findings reveal a systematic divergence between institutional narratives of efficiency and empowerment and the lived experience of dependency, conditional inclusion, and labour precarity reported by communities and workers. Inclusive business is shown to operate simultaneously as a discursive project that reframes poverty as a technical rather than a political problem, a governance mechanism that repositions the state as a facilitator rather than a provider, and a material system that redistributes risk downward while consolidating corporate control. Rather than dissolving structural inequality, these models reorganize it into a market-compatible form — a process best described as managed participation. The article concludes that inclusive business's transformative potential is not inherent but conditional, constrained by the very political-economic arrangements it helps to reproduce, and calls for development scholarship and policy to re-politicize questions of poverty that market-based paradigms have worked to render technical.