ABSTRACT
Sustainability studies, aiming to analyse potentially transformative models, have taken up the study of social enterprises operating in the ecology sector, known as ‘ecopreneurship’. Ecopreneurship is perceived as a policy tool for solving the complex problems of the environmental and unemployment crisis. In order to provide insights into the capacity of ecopreneurship to contribute to the lives of women in the Global South, this chapter questions whether ecopreneurship is truly transformative of women’s lives and emancipatory from gendered discriminations. Feminist critical discourse analysis is used to interrogate the ‘grand narrative’ of ecopreneurship and examine it based on local stories of women ecopreneurs from Bangladesh, India and Ghana. If the neoliberal grand narrative generates a depoliticisation of social change which in particular disregards gender or sees ‘superwomen’ as masculinised women who take on neoliberal, male characteristics to succeed in the global economy, the local stories show how women carefully recraft social relations, how these social relations contribute by conferring a higher status and hence symbolic capital to activities of care, both social care and environmental care.
