Degrowth-oriented entrepreneurial identity in rural agrifood: Evidence from women-led firms in Ireland

This paper introduces the concept of degrowth-oriented entrepreneurial identity, and theorises how it is formed and enacted in practice by combining degrowth research with rural women entrepreneurship, employing a Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) lens. Drawing on eleven semi-structured interviews with small-scale women agrifood entrepreneurs in rural Ireland, we demonstrate that degrowth values of sufficiency, care, reciprocity, and locality shape their entrepreneurial identity around stewardship and community well-being; the ability to align production to these values heightens the expression of this identity. Recognition within dense, location-based customer/supplier networks enables care-centred innovations, whereas the institutional support system designed for entrepreneurs often constrains locally embedded firms from innovating. Growth-first metrics suppress the visibility and legitimacy of low-waste, local, and relational innovations, while institutions may realign support with rural value creation when adopting plural metrics (e.g., local employment quality, waste avoided, food miles, mentoring/education). Sustained engagement in socio-ecological initiatives (e.g. youth outreach, mentoring, collaborative provisioning) reinforces women's degrowth-oriented entrepreneurial identity and shifts local norms toward collaborative, place-based rural entrepreneurship. We formalize these insights as propositions and an exploratory framework, thereby establishing degrowth-oriented entrepreneurial identity (DO-EI) as a novel exploratory lens to explore rural women entrepreneurship, and specifying how institutions can recognize and resource women's contributions to rural sustainability transitions.