SEEGROW · Southeast Europe’s emerging growth advocates: Domestic firms, technology and economic governance in institutionally weak states

Southeast Europe’s emerging growth advocates: Domestic firms, technology and economic governance in institutionally weak states

SEEGROW engaged with political economy, institutional economics, management, collective action and governance literatures. It was interested in economic governance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the era of information and communication technology (ICT) and knowledge driven growth. It was empirically grounded in Serbia and Bosnia & Herzegovina with an aim to improve our understanding of this phenomenon in semi-peripheral countries with weak and captured formal institutions, such as those in Southeast Europe (SEE). The project’s starting premise was that the rise of ICT has opened up international opportunities for SMEs with industrial skills but little capital. This then reduces the negative impact of weak formal governance structures on the countries’ overall innovation and growth. The project had three key main objectives: (1) To understand in which ways the interaction of SMEs with ICT empowers them to offset some undesirable institutional influences in SEE; (2) To promote the value of contextualised fieldwork in enhancing our understanding of the political economy of economic development in captured states with weak institutions; and (3) To support economic development efforts in SEE and beyond, by providing an alternative account on governance of the new ICT-driven growth frontier. Most economic and political economy analyses of the SEE region have focused on institutional reforms and the strengthening of state capacities as key preconditions to growth, while sociological efforts have been directed towards problematising the ideology of neoliberalism as a key macrostructural explanation for SEE’s lagged development. SEEGROW uses interdisciplinarity to bring into these debates the question of individual agency in the ICT era and how humans influence the rules that structure their lives instead of being captured by the status quo. SEEGROW is of high political and policy relevance because it changes the way that the international development assistance community (including EU enlargement efforts) looks at the problem of development in institutionally weak states. Instead of worrying about the captured state’s inability to reform, and looking for ways to overturn this predicament, the project turns their attention towards bottom-up sources of change which, under the influence of exogenous factors such as ICT could perhaps become empowered to change the rules of the game. SEEGROW unpacks the traditional policy paradigm that formal rules of the game must change first and gives agency to bottom-up agents. This question is extremely important for the EU and its role in SEE and its other neighbourhoods.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union