If You Can’t Let Go: The Role of Emotional Dependency in Global South–North Social Enterprises

Abstract While social entrepreneurs’ pro‐social motivation and other‐oriented emotions often drive their collaborative efforts to tackle grand challenges like poverty or gender inequality in the Global South, we know little about how collective emotions shape Global South–North partnerships over time. Drawing on a comparative longitudinal study of two Ugandan‐German social enterprise partnerships with the joint goal of achieving the Southern partner’s self‐reliance, we problematize how collective emotions may lead to various stages of collective emotional dependency and hence foster postcolonial repercussions. We introduce collective emotional dependency as an inherent micro‐level mechanism that may manifest, surface, and become (dis‐)embedded beyond macro‐level dependencies. Our findings illustrate the double‐edged nature of the collective emotions in each phase of the partnership, as they can be both beneficial and detrimental. Our study shows that longstanding power inequalities, which South–North social enterprise partnerships set out to reduce in the first place, remain present in the everyday relational practices of organizing and collaborating.