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Camaren Peter (PhD) is an Associate Professor in the Allan Gray Centre for Values-Based Leadership at the Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town. He is also the Director and Executive Head of the Centre for Analytics and Behavioural Change (CABC NPC). He graduated with a cum-laude honors degree in Theoretical Physics in 1997 (University of Natal, Durban), holds a masters degree in Astrophysics from the University of Cape Town (2002) and a PhD in Business Administration from the GSB, University of Cape Town (2010). His research and practice leverage complexity theory to prepare leaders and decision-makers to tackle the grand challenges of the 21st Century. These range from political, technological and socio-cultural transitions and their implications to powerful global change phenomena, such as urbanization, resource scarcity, ecosystems degradation and climate change, particularly in the Global South. Camaren has worked extensively on the urban development challenges facing Africa.
This study theorizes social innovation-based transitions to sustainable urban development from the perspective of the African urban condition, highlighting that large infrastructure and service provision deficits, poverty, inequality, heavy import dependence and the prevalence of dual formal–informal sector systems are key factors to account for in a just, sustainable urban African developmental transition. It identifies an opportunity space that can be leveraged for urban and broader transitions to sustainability on the continent by leveraging “economic ecosystems” for local scale social innovation-based development interventions. It theorizes that multi-level transitions to sustainability can be engendered by adopting an entrepreneurial state led approach at local scales by using economic ecosystems as the framework to (1) stimulate social innovation-based entrepreneurship that meets local and local–regional demands through decentralized, low cost, small-scale infrastructures, technologies and services, (2) leverage social innovation-based economic ecosystems for catalyzing multi-scalar transitions to sustainability, (3) recast the role of the entrepreneurial state, specifically in relation to social innovation and sustainable urban development (SUD) in Africa and (4) bridge formal–informal sector dualism. This framing prioritizes local economic development over centralized, state-led interventions that involve grand-scale masterplans, wholly new satellite cities and bulk infrastructure deployments in conceptualizing sustainable urban development transitions in Africa.
Camaren Peter. Social Innovation for Sustainable Urban Developmental Transitions in Sub-Saharan Africa: Leveraging Economic Ecosystems and the Entrepreneurial State. Sustainability 2021, 13, 7360 .
AMA StyleCamaren Peter. Social Innovation for Sustainable Urban Developmental Transitions in Sub-Saharan Africa: Leveraging Economic Ecosystems and the Entrepreneurial State. Sustainability. 2021; 13 (13):7360.
Chicago/Turabian StyleCamaren Peter. 2021. "Social Innovation for Sustainable Urban Developmental Transitions in Sub-Saharan Africa: Leveraging Economic Ecosystems and the Entrepreneurial State." Sustainability 13, no. 13: 7360.