Abstract
Women-led green SMEs combine environmental missions with constrained growth trajectories, facing limited green finance, market access, technical skills, and socio-cultural biases that impede scaling and sustainability outcomes(Gupta, R., 2025; Kiyuvo et al., 2023). Empirical studies document infrastructure shortfalls, regulatory barriers, and uneven policy support that amplify measurement weaknesses and obscure non-financial impacts such as social value and community resilience (Gabelaia, 2025; Gupta, K., 2025).Existing assessments often omit gender-disaggregated indicators and integrated sustainability metrics, leaving practitioners and policymakers without actionable, context-aware performance tools for scaling green ventures led by women (Shankar et al., 2020; Gupta, R., 2025).Despite growing recognition of women entrepreneurs' contributions to sustainable development, performance management systems (PMS) remain largely generic, privileging standardised ESG metrics or lean tools without capturing women-led SMEs' resource constraints, relational assets, and innovation pathways; this limits their utility for scaling green impact(Kimuli et al., 2022; Alfarizi et al., 2024).The theoretical gap lies in the lack of integration among Green-Lean operational logics, resource-based perspectives, dynamic capabilities, and social capital lenses to produce a PMS that is both scalable and sensitive to gendered contexts(Ahmed, 2024; Alfarizi et al., 2024).
This study aims to design a context-sensitive PMS tailored to women-led green SMEs, validate its ability to predict and improve scalable sustainability, and produce practitioner toolkits and policy guidance grounded in empirical evidence. A sequential mixed-methods design will combine comparative case studies and semi-structured interviews with women founders across sectors (Gupta, R., 2025), a cross-sectional survey employing PLS-SEM for construct validation (Ahmed, 2024; Rani, 2025), and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) benchmarking to identify efficiency frontiers and improvement paths for scalability. Secondary datasets, digital trace data on market engagement, and energy/productivity measures will triangulate performance outcomes (Xuan et al, 2024).
The theoretical framework synthesises Green-Lean principles for waste reduction and environmental efficiency with resource-based view(RBV)emphasis on firm-specific green competencies, dynamic capabilities for sensing and reconfiguring in turbulent environments, and social capital for network-enabled scaling, producing a multi-level PMS architecture linking resources, routines, relationships, and outcomes(Kimuli et al., 2022;Sriyani et al., 2022). Expected contributions include a theoretically integrated PMS model, an empirically validated KPI taxonomy, and three practical deliverables: a DEA+SEM benchmarking dashboard, a gender-lens scaling toolkit for incubators, and targeted policy briefs for gendered green finance and incubation programs. These outputs aim to inform scholarship, practitioners, and policymakers seeking measurable pathways to scale sustainable impact in women-led green SMEs(Shankar et al., 2020; Rani, 2025;Xuan, Jamaluddin et al., 2024).