Paper short abstract:

This paper theorizes and empirically investigates why and how women do (not) become entrepreneurs in the national, state, and local bamboo value chains of India.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we seek to answer the following research questions: a) why do women (not) become entrepreneurs in the bamboo value chains of India, and b) how do regulatory, normative and cognitive factors in India affect their entrepreneurial behavior? In theoretical terms, the paper theorizes how the interaction between value chain dynamics and regulatory, normative, and cognitive institutions affect women’s entrepreneurial behavior in diverse contexts throughout India. Our theoretical framework distinguishes between how national, state-level, and local-level value chains affect the entrepreneurial behavior of women bamboo entrepreneurs, and how different regulatory, normative, and cognitive institutions facilitate and/or constrain their behavior within these value chains. We use a stylized case study to illustrate how these value chain and institutional dynamics play out in both similar and different ways in producer states in four key producing areas of India: Meghalaya, Assam, Madhya Pradesh, and Odisha.