Social entrepreneurship is a relatively recent approach to socio-economic development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) that has emerged in the early 2000s and has been ‘booming’ since the Arab uprisings. Social entrepreneurs address social issues through business means. They have adapted the international neoliberal discourse emphasizing innovation, sustainability, entrepreneurship and active citizenship and seek strategic, cross-sector partnerships with the state, private sector, donors and communities. Yet, little research has been conducted on this phenomenon and how it relates to strategies of authoritarian renewal of the political regimes in power in the MENA region. In general, there is a substantive literature on neoliberalism and authoritarian renewal in the MENA region. Some of the questions on how societal actors respond to neoliberalism and authoritarian renewal have been addressed. Notwithstanding the contributions of these literatures, there is a lack of knowledge on how and to what extent state, societal actors, business and international actors actually join up and despite their commitment to socio-economic development contribute to authoritarian renewal. Social Entrepreneurship research, on the other hand, neglects the political and it hardly engages in critical analyses. With regard to the MENA region, only few studies cover social entrepreneurship but remain rather descriptive and ignore the political entirely. This paper addresses these gaps through a diverse case study of social entrepreneurship networks (SENs) – composed of state institutions, private sector actors, support organizations and social entrepreneurs – in Jordan, Egypt and Morocco in the period between 2003 and 2014. It does so through a social network analysis based on semi-structured interviews and secondary material. Empirical data collection took place during field research between 2011 and 2013. The main argument is that SENs contribute to authoritarian renewal in several ways: They include select actors/groups of actors and raise a new elite generation of socio-economic leaders; generate (im-)material resources such as finance and international linkages and they engage in problem-fixing of pressing socio-economic issues. However, the three cases analyzed in this paper suggest that the engagement of the different types of actors in a SEN and the existence of a political agenda on socio-economic development to which social entrepreneurs can be aligned plays a decisive role in how and to what extent SENs contribute to authoritarian renewal. Related to that, not the state type (monarchy/republic) but the engagement of the state matters.