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Institutional development has attracted more attention in the past two decades. However, institutional theory finds itself in a pre-consolidated phase and there are various theoretical and methodological challenges. One is to respond to the question whether institutional change is a spontaneous evolutionary or a deliberately designed process or a combination of the two. Another question concerns institutional co-innovation: i.e. the interaction between technological innovations, changes in institutional arrangements and changes in the institutional environment. A methodological challenge concerns the study of common institutional needs, which under different conditions can give rise to various concrete institutional forms. This paper researches how a common institutional need to develop institutional arrangements for rural collective action in order to enable small farmers to participate in newly created export chains in different contexts leads to different institutional arrangements and outcomes. By comparing two cases, the paper seeks to unravel which factors and actors play what roles and how these explain differences in the process of institutional development and in that way to arrive at a better understanding of local institutional change. After a general introduction, I present an overview of the diverse literature on institutional change. After that, bird's eye views will be presented of the two case studies. The first refers to the development of export agriculture around asparagus in the North of Peru and the second relates to the introduction of new apicultural technologies in the North West of Uganda. In the final section the main commonalities and differences in institutional development are examined and an attempt is made to respond to the main challenges formulated above.

In spite of growing mobility of production and production factors, economic development is increasingly localized in economic agglomerations. This article reviews three partially overlapping perspectives on local economic development, which derive from three factors intensifying the localized nature of economic development: externalities, learning and governance. Externalities play a central role in the new geographical economics of Krugman and in new economic geography of clusters and industrial districts. The dynamics of local economic development are increasingly associated with evolutionary economic thinking in general and with collective learning in particular. Inter‐firm and extra‐firm organization has experienced considerable innovation in the last few decades. New institutional devices are based on the notions of commodity chain, cluster and milieu. These innovations introduce new issues of economic governance both at the level of industry and of territory.

In this paper we aim to contribute to the literature on social entrepreneurship by nuancing both existing micro-level characterizations as well as its presumed macro level societal impacts. Moreover, we explore connections between the micro and macro levels of analysis to see which types of social entrepreneurs are more likely to achieve what kinds of societal impacts. We present findings from an illustrative sample of 28 interviews with Dutch social entrepreneurs working in International Development. At the micro level, our qualitative findings do not support a perception of social entrepreneurs – often found in the Anglo Saxon literature - as heroic 'lone rangers' who 'go it alone' and with 'dogged determination' fight for a self-defined social cause. Instead, most social entrepreneurs in our study are acutely aware of the need to cooperate with other stakeholders and often use existing 'off the shelf' social causes and theories of change, even when they do develop innovative ways to try and achieve these goals. At the macro level, two starkly contrasting views exist on the possible societal impacts of social entrepreneurs. The first is an, often implicit, extension of the 'lone-ranger' perception of social entrepreneurs as people who 'change the world' or at least significantly contribute to social and economic transformation. At the other end of the spectrum in the literature we find those who argue that social entrepreneurs are potentially counterproductive to international development interventions as their social mission is not the result of a 'collective deliberative process', their activities are likely to displace NGO and/or government interventions and might even give governments an excuse to not intervene and ignore deeper levels of political contestation and societal inequalities. The paper is structured as follows. We first explain the rise in social entrepreneurship in international development, and we introduce the central assumptions in the literature on how social entrepreneurs define their ...