The Editor’s Post: Is 2024 impact’s big year?

Julie Pybus 26th January 2024

Key developments that will shape the social economy in 2024. Plus, the World Cooperative Monitor and research finds UK social economy lags European neighbours. This week’s view from the Pioneers Post newsroom.

Talk of turning points, tipping points, revolutionary change and the like should often be avoided. If you’re not careful, you end up coming across these earth-shattering moments every few months, which can be quite exhausting.

Yet, having reported upon social enterprises, impact investment and the social economy for a couple of decades, it does feel as if something is shifting. As the world faces the polycrisis of climate breakdown, geopolitical tensions, economic pressures and more, the impact community has raised its ambitions, calling for fundamental changes to the global economic system and demanding seats at the decision-making tables.

And perhaps now the world is listening. Last spring’s United Nations Resolution on the Social and Solidarity Economy demonstrated in black and white that global leaders recognised the contribution that social enterprises, cooperatives and others make to creating a sustainable future. Accompanying this, the latest and most comprehensive effort to date to quantify the size of the social entrepreneurship sector estimated last week that there are 10m social enterprises worldwide, in a sector that is double the size of the global advertising industry.

So, knowing the sector’s size and power, where do we go from here? In the wake of the big, global debates at COP28 and the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, our reporter, David Lyons, has been looking back at some of the major impact community-focused developments that took place in 2023 and asking some key thinkers what 2024 could hold. Read their thoughts in his article, which is online now.