Institutional co-innovation in value chain development. A comparative study of agro-export products in Uganda and Peru

Abstract

Institutional development has attracted more attention in the past two decades. However, institutional theory finds itself in a pre-consolidated phase and there are many 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 the interaction between technological innovations, changes in institutional arrangements and changes in the institutional environment in the dynamics of processes of institutional development. This links to another key question concerning the synchronicity in or co-evolution of institutional change processes at various levels and in various public and private domains. Institutional innovation rarely concerns one single institution but normally concerns bundles of public and private order institutions created at various levels. 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, each with its own technological requirements and 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 review of literature and the elaboration of a framework to answer the above questions, the paper presents a bird’s eye views of the two case studies. The first refers to the introduction of new apicultural technologies in the North West of Uganda and the second relates to the introduction of high value horticulture exports crops in the North of Peru. The final section examines the main commonalities and differences in institutional development and makes an attempt to respond to the main questions formulated above.