The aim of this paper is to present the historical background of the civil society organizations in Chile and to identify and characterize the different sets of Chilean civil society organizations that can be interpretable as social enterprises.
From the historical point of view, five main periods in the development of civil society organizations are identified, following Radrigán et. al (2010). Starting from the pre-Columbian period and passing through the industrialization and the dictatorship, some distinctive traits in the development of these organizations are described and analyzed.
Like in other contexts, from the conceptual point of view several terms are employed in Chile in order to identify those economic initiatives that do not belong to the public sector nor to traditional for profit enterprises. From the conceptual point of view, the development of the sector in Chile has been influenced by three main trends (Radrigán & Barria, 2005): 1) the “social economy” concept, mainly deriving from the European, and especially French, school of thought, 2) the “third sector” or “nonprofit” concept, influenced mainly by the US stream of thought (Irarrázaval et al, 2006), and 3) the “social and solidarity economy” concept (Razeto, 1986; Coraggio, 1999; Gaiger, 1999), that was coined in Latin America with the aim of differentiating it from the traditional cooperative sector, that was becoming more and more similar to the traditional forprofit sector, especially in the case of large agricultural cooperatives. In Chile, the terms “third sector” or “social and solidarity economy” are the most employed in this sense (Radrigán et al., 2010), even though the concept of social economy is also present, especially in the academic environment and literature.
The paper then presents a series of Chilean civil society organizations that offer different types of solutions to people and communities’ needs: More specifically, these organizations are: 1) community organizations, 2) cooperatives, 3) trade associations, 4) indigenous organizations, 5) mutual societies, 6) nonprofit enterprises, 7) nonprofit foundations, 8) trade unions, 9) popular economy organizations. We provide a definition for each of these categories and, relying also on the welfare triangle (Pestoff, 1998, 2005), we analyze whether they can be considered or not as social enterprises.
This descriptive analysis confirms the relative importance of the third sector in Chile, but it also highlights a lack of specific studies, that are still very few in number, and a lack of recognition both at the policy and at the academic levels. The paper, following Radrigán and Barria (2005), concludes analyzing three main possible scenarios for the future development of these civil society initiatives.
Keywords: social enterprise models, Chile, social economy, third sector, social and solidarity economy
References:
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Gaiger, L.I. (1999) “La solidaridad como una alternativa económica para los pobres”, CIRIEC España, Revista de Economía Pública, Social y Cooperativa, 31, 187-205.
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