Citizen Entrepreneurship

This book offers the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary framework for understanding how entrepreneurial citizens mobilise capabilities, govern shared resources, and shape entrepreneurial ecosystems to produce systemic change. Bringing together leading scholars and practitioner-researchers from Europe, Africa, and Asia, this edited volume positions citizen entrepreneurship as a distinct paradigm—moving beyond business, social, civic, and public entrepreneurship by foregrounding collective agency, commons governance, capability enhancement, and distributed value creation.

Across conceptual chapters, empirical case studies, and policy-facing analysis, contributors illuminate how citizens act as users, producers, and co-governors of shared resources in response to institutional fatigue, democratic erosion, inequality, urban sustainability challenges, cultural marginalisation, and post-apartheid reconstruction. The volume also engages the accelerating implications of digital technologies and AI for citizen-led action and ecosystem transformation.

With clear relevance to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, this book is essential reading for scholars and students in entrepreneurship, public policy, urban studies, development studies, and governance, as well as for policymakers, planners, NGOs, and practitioners working on participatory approaches to sustainable and inclusive change