Does changing the way we do business hold the key to creating a world where resources are shared more equitably and consumed within planetary limits? According to Professor Donnie Maclurcan of the Post Growth Institute, the answer is a definitive yes – but only if we can fully embrace a business model that doesn’t require profits to be distributed to shareholders, and works instead to reinvest revenues back into the company. Increasingly, socially and environmentally conscious entrepreneurs are adopting not-for-profit (NFP) business practices across the whole spectrum of traditionally for-profit sectors. Maclurcan, whose book ‘How on Earth’ co-authored with Jennifer Hinton is due out next year, firmly believes that the NFP model presents an alternative macroeconomic framework with the potential to revolutionise how we produce goods and services, and thereby pave the way for an ‘economics of enough’.
Maclurcan argues that the fundamental flaw inherent in socially-oriented forms of commerce that are not strictly NFP (such as B-corps in the US, or social enterprises and Community Interest Companies in the UK) is that they all potentially allow profits to be given to shareholders as dividends. Since this is impossible to do within a NFP framework, the company can focus entirely on job creation as well as its positive ecological and social impacts, without the pressure to maximise returns every quarter regardless of any damaging externalities that might result. Maclurcan suggests that this approach enables businesses to adopt a new triple bottom line of ‘people, planet and not-for-profit’.
resilience
