La Nouvelle Économie du Climat comme révélateur des limites des cadres dominants de business models : Analyse critique à partir de trois cas d'entrepreneuriat circulaire en République Démocratique du Congo

Details

Supervisors

Xhauflair, Virginie

Faculty

Faculté des sciences économiques, sociales, politiques et de communication

Degree label

Master de spécialisation en économie sociale

Abstract

enDominant business model frameworks - from the Business Model Canvas (BMC) to its sustainability-oriented derivatives - were designed in and for institutional contexts of the global North. Their claim to universality has never been seriously tested in environments characterized by institutional informality and endogenous organizational logics irreducible to standard analytical categories. The New Climate Economy (NCE) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) represents in this regard a singular space of entrepreneurial experimentation, where economic initiatives - particularly those related to circular economy - emerge under structural conditions that these analytical frameworks are not, a priori, equipped to capture. The business model is taken as the unit of analysis, and three case studies of circular entrepreneurship operating within the NCE in the DRC are mobilized to put these frameworks under tension against their own categories. The approach, abductive and pragmatist, informed by post-developmentalist and decolonial sensibilities, treats the BMC less as a normative tool than as a revealer of its own constitutive tensions. The cross-case analysis surfaces three registers of mismatch: what the frameworks freeze while reality is fundamentally fluid; what falls entirely outside their analytical dimensions; and what they presuppose from a North-centered standpoint. These findings lead to questioning the relevance of the "regenerative" label as applied to these trajectories, and to exploring a third category complementary to the “by design” / “by coincidence” distinction (Upward & Jones, 2016): the “by becoming” (Vlasov, 2021), designating trajectories in which a potentially regenerative dimension emerges progressively, non-intentionally, through situated learning. The conclusion refrains from proposing an alternative framework in the interest of epistemological coherence, and instead outlines conditions for a collaboratively developed research program that could enrich the literature on sustainable business models beyond the contexts in which it originated.