2.5 Participatory governance in the Belgian, Greek, and UK social enterprise law

This Sub-section 2.5 examines the legal variable of participatory governance in the three selected tailor-made legal frameworks for social enterprises. Participatory governance concerns the structure of ownership and control, such as the role of various stakeholders in the selected legal forms in respect of their decision-making processes. As international scholarship on the subject indicates, it is common for social enterprises to have a structure that avails multi- stakeholder ownership. This means that ownership of shares and membership in a social enterprise may comprise various types of stakeholders, which can then participate in the decision-making bodies of the social enterprise. Examples are employees, customers, volunteers and/or public authorities.1 Cafaggi and Iamiceli note that ‘the social enterprise is often defined as a multi-stakeholder entity, which suggests that different interests should be given a voice and legal protection within its governance structure’.2 Galera and Borzaga also point to ‘the assignment of ownership rights and control power to stakeholders other than investors coupled with an open and participatory governance model’.3 Therefore, this legal variable also concerns the power of various types of stakeholders in the decision-making of the social enterprise as exercised in the form of ownership rights, for instance shares, voting rights and/or supervision and consultancy rights. Indeed, the Commission’s definition of social enterprises highlights the fact that a characteristic of a social enterprise is that decision- making power is not per se based on capital ownership. Rather, in the Commission’s definition, emphasis is placed on the open management of social enterprises and participatory governance involving various types of stakeholders, such as ‘employees, consumers and stakeholders affected by the commercial activities’.4