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Building BoP Business Models for Sustainable Poverty Alleviation: System Tips and System Traps

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Business Models for Sustainability Transitions

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Abstract

Sustainable development requires both long-term and large-scale changes to production and consumption patterns, and the eradication of extreme poverty. In this study we argue that pursuing these goals independently can result in business models that tie poverty alleviation to increased environmental degradation and thus work at cross purposes to sustainability transition. We explore how three types of business models for addressing poverty at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP)—delivering, sourcing, and reorganising models—can either impede or support sustainability transition in the global south by enacting different business model roles. We use examples from 17 business models from Indonesia and the Philippines to explore the sustainability misalignment risks each model type is prone to and distil key business model design features and enablers that support their alignment with sustainability transition by enabling them to avoid common system traps.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For instance, environmental considerations are largely absent from Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the UN’s Human Development Index, the World Bank’s ‘Dollar-a-day’ definition of poverty, and the two main academic approaches to the measurement of relative poverty: Townsend’s idea of relative deprivation (Townsend, 1979) and Sen’s Capabilities Approach (Sen, 1999).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management and Marketing, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia

    Jodi C. York

  2. Centre for Social Impact, Swinburne University, Hawthorn, VIC, Australia

    Krzysztof Dembek

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  1. Jodi C. York
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  2. Krzysztof Dembek
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Correspondence to Jodi C. York .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Business Development & Technology, Aarhus University, Herning, Denmark

    Annabeth Aagaard

  2. European Sustainability Department, ESCP Business School, Berlin, Germany

    Florian Lüdeke-Freund

  3. Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Peter Wells

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York, J.C., Dembek, K. (2021). Building BoP Business Models for Sustainable Poverty Alleviation: System Tips and System Traps. In: Aagaard, A., Lüdeke-Freund, F., Wells, P. (eds) Business Models for Sustainability Transitions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77580-3_5

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