At the Risk of Not Being Decolonial Enough

A burgeoning area of scholarship and practice focuses on market-based approaches to development, such as capacity building for entrepreneurship, value chain development, and provision of microfinance to enable poor people in the Global South to benefit from markets (Elliot et al., 2008; McMullen, 2011; Meyer-Stamer, 2006; van Wijk et al., 2020). Market mechanisms have been seen as promoting economic growth for all, including poor people (Brännvall, 2023; Gabre-Madhin & Nagarajan, 2004). One such mechanism, entrepreneurship, is seen as having enormous potential to eradicate poverty by remedying market failures and reforming or even revolutionizing markets (Sutter et al., 2019).

Yet a contrasting branch of literature on decolonization is particularly critical of market-based approaches. This critique focuses on unequal power relationships between development agencies and beneficiaries (Khan et al., 2007), and the use of Western approaches that do not center the voices of beneficiaries (Saldanha et al., 2022) and thus fail to consider local realities and needs (De Smet & Boroş, 2021). Furthermore, development organizations’ evaluation of such approaches may be blind to systemic flaws (Mignolo & Escobar, 2010; Ramarajan & Reid, 2020): interveners may pick the easiest targets (Calás et al., 2009) or focus more on quantity (reaching as many people as possible) than quality (matching the needs of people) (De Smet & Boroş, 2021). Hence, critiques of Western-based interventions in marginalized settings in the Global South challenge the implicit assumption that good intentions lead to good outcomes (Khan et al., 2007).

Despite the many well-founded issues with the approach, we (two women from the West and a woman and a man from the Global South) want to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater: doing nothing to respond to crushing poverty and inequality is not acceptable either. As academics working with development organizations, we have resources and a privileged platform to make a difference. These privileges strengthen our moral obligation to contribute to poverty alleviation – yet we must also be critical of our own research practices. We can positively affect environments with good intentions (Wegener et al., 2024), but we must also be aware of the potential to cause unintentional harm (Chrispal, 2025).

We propose a framework distinguishing different approaches to research on market-based interventions that build on two key practices: reflexivity and engagement with local actors. Based on our own research and the papers in this Research in the Sociology of Organizations volume (Fohim, 2025), we suggest ways that researchers can consciously strive to decolonize market-based interventions to make their scholarly practices more impactful for communities. We argue that taking a reflexive pragmatist approach to intervention can be an avenue for impacting grand challenges that can respond to the needs of marginalized people while at the same time creating space for them to question the structures they are part of and their place within those structures.

At first glance, the literatures on market-based and decolonizing approaches seem to have incongruent assumptions and characteristics. Many market-based approaches rely on entrepreneurship initiatives, seeing the promotion of micro-enterprise creation (McMullen, 2011) or entrepreneurial skills and methods development (Slade Shantz et al., 2024) in the Global South as a concrete way to generate local impact and empower those in marginalized conditions (Alvarez & Barney, 2013). On the other hand, literature on decolonization highlights the detrimental effects of international organizations’ interventions on local beneficiaries, suggesting that many entrepreneurship initiatives risk doing more harm than good by simply reinforcing existing power structures and norms (Brännvall, 2023; Calás et al., 2009; Khan et al., 2007). As researchers of market-based approaches, we find this critique bears careful thought in several areas.

Market-based approaches often focus on changing the behavior of marginalized entrepreneurs, indirectly placing on them the responsibility for solving their marginalization and implicitly suggesting they haven’t been entrepreneurial enough (Karnani, 2008). A decolonial perspective emphasizes the limits of the approach since it neglects structural inequalities produced by colonial history and patriarchy,¹ along with current practices of resource exploitation by Western powers. People cannot simply “entrepreneur themselves out of poverty” if the structures in which they operate continue to marginalize them and absolve the exploiters from the responsibility to right past (and current) wrongs (Hickey & Mohan, 2004). We accept this critique but continue to believe that entrepreneurship can be a mechanism for social change (Calás et al., 2009). By emphasizing personal agency, entrepreneurial methods encourage people to question existing structures and act to create new possibilities – entrepreneurship as a method has empowerment at its core. In addition, we believe that by providing resources (such as inclusive finance) and adapting entrepreneurial ecosystems to be more supportive, the constraints poor and marginalized actors face can be loosened somewhat. Together, these features can allow poor and marginalized actors to take some actions to improve their circumstances even when the power structures that oppress them make no move to change.

Market-based interventions tend to use Western conceptions of entrepreneurship (Calás et al., 2009; Slade Shantz et al., 2018), privileging heroic, growth-oriented, individualistic entrepreneurs (Welter et al., 2017) and replicating exploitative and patriarchal Western business practices (Ng et al., 2022). A decolonial perspective suggests that pre-existing norms and practices in the context are not understood, appreciated, or even violated, leading to unintended consequences (Khan et al., 2007). Rich local traditions of entrepreneurship may be silenced as Western, patriarchal knowledge is privileged (Calás et al., 2009) in training programs designed by international development actors to fit their own (Western) frameworks and objectives (De Smet & Boroş, 2021). To avoid this problem, reflexivity and deep engagement with local actors are necessary to ensure that market-based interventions fit their contexts.

Market-based interventions have often not lived up to their promise to alleviate poverty despite resource investments (Alvarez & Barney, 2013). Development initiatives designed to support entrepreneurship through resource provision and training often fail to achieve substantial, lasting, and transformative impact because they neglect to address the root causes of poverty and inequality (Cornwall, 2016) and fail to embed changes in enduring social structures. Persistent biases from dominant groups hinder entrepreneurs’ access to markets and resources (Alvarez & Barney, 2013; Mair et al., 2016) and saddle marginalized groups such as women and those of lower caste with domestic and other burdens that limit their ability to invest effort into their businesses (Chigunta et al., 2005; Fatoki & Chindoga, 2011). They also often fail to understand the reality of the people they try to help, both at the structural and epistemic levels (Brännvall, 2023; Konadu-Osei et al., 2022). Development organizations’ misunderstandings of the lived experiences of poor people lead to interventions that are not tailored to the latter’s needs (De Smet & Boroş, 2021). Again, reflexivity and deep engagement with local actors are necessary to ensure that market-based interventions are consistent with the needs of local actors.

In summary, decolonial scholars argue that for true empowerment, local entrepreneurs must decolonize their own minds by reflecting on the structures of agency, power, and inequalities around them (Cornwall, 2016; Freire, 1996). This requires a deep engagement with the local cultural context (Rappaport, 1987) and the active participation of local entrepreneurs and their local supporters (Sholkamy, 2010) in the co-creation of place-based initiatives (Escobar, 2018; Uda, 2025; Wandersman et al., 2005; Zoogah et al., 2025). Initiatives should be embedded in social solidarity groups (Cornwall, 2016; McKague et al., 2015) and affect social norms around such entrepreneurs to ensure access to markets, resources, and time to invest in their businesses (Mair et al., 2012).

Despite intense debate between proponents of market-based approaches and those who mobilize decolonial lenses, both streams aim for the same objective – poverty alleviation – but believe in different means and mechanisms to achieve this goal. We acknowledge the importance of this intellectual debate but believe that, as scholars, we have the responsibility to push our research practice beyond dichotomies of right or wrong to seek plural perspectives. We seek to engage in research that allows us to alleviate poverty through market-based approaches, bearing in mind the important limits highlighted by a decolonial perspective. We believe that pragmatism, with its emphasis on acting for change and its belief in emancipation (Wegener et al., 2024), can guide us in this direction.

We present a framework classifying market-based approaches in development settings based on two practices: engagement with local actors and reflexivity (Fig. 1).

Engagement with local actors involves interacting with local actors to build understanding and relationships, with the aim of co-designing research interventions. Previous research on pragmatist action has highlighted the importance of engaging with diverse actors over time to allow for the emergence of enriched, plural understandings of both problems and potential solutions (Ferraro et al., 2015). From a decolonial perspective, projects aimed at producing impact should place people at the center of the research process (Saldanha et al., 2022), building empowerment, defined by Kabeer (1999, p. 435) as “a process by which those who have been denied the ability to make strategic life choices acquire such an ability.” This type of research requires extensive investment of resources and time in building shared understanding with local actors.

Reflexivity refers to an awareness of how power structures embedded in sociohistorical realities shape our perceptions and enable and constrain individual opportunities (Bourdieu, 2004; Freire, 1996). Freire (1996) adds that reflexivity includes awareness of our capacity to transform our reality. Reflexivity among researchers has been defined as “the process of engaging in self-reflection about who we are as researchers, how our subjectivities and biases guide and inform the research process, and how our worldview is shaped by the research we do and vice versa.” (Jamieson et al., 2023, p. 1).

Reflexivity enables researchers to be sensitive to the power structures both in the research process (Bhopal, 2010) and the research context of local actors in order to understand epistemic and cultural differences (De Smet & Boroş, 2021; Konadu-Osei et al., 2022), and avoid reproducing colonialist power structures in the research (De Smet & Boroş, 2021). Researchers can try to enhance research participants’ own reflexivity, enabling them to become conscious of power structures and the possibility of transforming their own reality. For example, Chrispal (this volume) described how a research participant touched her feet to signal deference, and Chrispal responded by touching the participant’s feet in turn to signal mutual respect.

We classify market-based interventions with marginalized communities into four quadrants based on these two dimensions.

In “extractive” research, researchers pursue their own objectives unreflexively with limited engagement with the local community. The power inequalities between researchers and the communities under study remain unmanaged because scholars perceive marginalized communities mainly as fieldwork opportunities (Auerbach Jahajeeah et al., 2025). Impacts for local actors are less likely to be positive and might be unintendedly negative: since the engagement of the local actors in designing the research intervention is low, it is unlikely to meet their needs.

A “decolonial evaluative” approach, featuring high reflexivity but low engagement, involves an evaluation of the interventions undertaken by others to assess how the interventions impact both desired outcomes and power structures. This approach, centered on a profound concern with power asymmetries, may yield valuable insights but become paralyzing, constraining positive impacts.

With “traditional collaborative” approaches, engagement with local actors is higher, but researchers lack reflexivity. The impact of the research might be to reproduce existing power structures (Kabeer, 1999/2011), potentially creating a cycle of dependency or creating interventions that do not endure beyond the research period since they fail to address root causes and local needs.

The approach we advocate in this paper is the “reflexive pragmatist,” which combines strong engagement with local actors and reflexivity to produce long-lasting and desired impacts. Our point of departure is the pragmatist theory of action, which emphasizes a situated, distributed, and processual approach to dealing with grand challenges (Ferraro et al., 2015; Gehman et al., 2022; Wegener et al., 2024). We build on its emphasis on distributed experimentation, defined as “iterative action that generates small wins, promotes evolutionary learning, and increases engagement while allowing unsuccessful efforts to be abandoned” (Ferraro et al., 2015, p. 376). This approach enables actors to incrementally experiment on specific problems, learning collectively. We argue that when pragmatic efforts are undertaken reflexively by both researchers and their local partners, there is potential for empowerment (Kabeer, 2011).

When local actors are involved in design in an empowered and reflexive way, they can ensure that interventions (a) address root causes, (b) resonate with them, and (c) become embedded in social structures, allowing them to be sustained. From the beginning, this approach integrates local knowledge with knowledge from the West and other places. Therefore, our approach is grounded in the belief that place-based approaches (Escobar, 2018; Uda, this volume) are necessary to design and deliver effective interventions and to avoid harm and unintended consequences.

In what follows, we describe how we have been adapting our methodology over time to perform research using a reflexive pragmatist approach.

In this section, we present how we adopt a “reflexive pragmatist” approach with our project SEED,² which we have been conducting for over 6 years. SEED partners include a multidisciplinary consortium of researchers from academic institutions, an international NGO (Desjardins International Development, DID) and local organizations that promote or support entrepreneurship in each location of intervention. Together, we have worked on projects in countries such as Sri Lanka, Haiti, Tunisia, Colombia, and Senegal to better understand the conditions for effective micro-enterprise scaling, with the assumption that a favorable entrepreneurial ecosystem and a stable economic base of micro-entrepreneurs in local communities will reduce inequalities. SEED’s objective is to co-create a knowledge program with local ecosystem actors that assists micro-entrepreneurs in increasing growth, empowerment, and innovation. The research relies on four main phases, consistent with an abductive experimentation approach (Kistruck & Slade Shantz, 2022). In what follows, we describe how to take a “reflexive pragmatist” perspective in each of these phases. We connect these practices with other articles published in this volume (Fohim, 2025).

An exploratory qualitative step is conducted to better understand the current situation experienced by the marginalized entrepreneurs targeted by the intervention, adopting a place-based approach (Escobar, 2018; Uda, this volume; Wandersman et al., 2005). In-depth interviews are conducted with beneficiaries and local ecosystem actors that work with them. We rely on local partners and translators to avoid the risks of epistemic violence, well described by Chrispal (this volume). In the same vein, Ginting – Szczesny et al. (this volume) and Uda (this volume) bring forward the idea of adopting a phenomenological posture to resist epistemic coloniality. In their research about home-based work in rural Indonesia, Ginting-Szczesny et al. (2025) captured the unique interpretation of home through tangible (e.g., material objects, household members) and intangible elements (e.g., relationships, emotions).

In Sri Lanka, for example, we began our research with a qualitative diagnosis to understand innovation in the lives of rural entrepreneurs since we initially saw only limited innovation in their businesses. We found that at home, these entrepreneurs were quite innovative – in cooking and fashion, for example, and in solving the many problems of everyday life. Our intervention could then focus on drawing analogies between how they innovated at home, and how they could innovate in their businesses.

Adopting a reflexive pragmatist approach within the exploratory phase allowed us to make more informed and grounded decisions in subsequent steps. It increased our awareness of issues and enabled us to braid our knowledge with local knowledge (Kimmerer, 2013), a practice also advocated by James et al. (2025). Approaches that combine indigenous or local knowledge with knowledge from Western and other traditions have the potential to expand what each knows and create unforeseen integrative benefits. For example, farmers’ local knowledge was finetuned by researchers using satellite data, AI, and expertise across a number of disciplines to predict the impacts of weather and climate on agriculture (and agricultural markets) in very specific local areas. The insights from the combined data, when customized to local farmers’ epistemic cultures, enabled Senegalese herders to plan their seasonal migrations and helped farmers and herders in Burkina Faso and elsewhere prepare for weather events that are now more erratic due to climate change (Armstrong, 2024).

Training interventions are co-designed iteratively. Researchers consult academic literature and prior practice and work together with international NGO staff, local entrepreneurship support organizations, and local trainers to co-create content and cases, pilot the training, and train other trainers. Our process thus answers Seremani and Bazana (2025) call for involving local actors as active participants in the research process rather than only involving them as a form of “politics of recognition,” which perceives as a weak form of decolonizing, grounded mainly in diversity and inclusion. We propose to move beyond the simple dichotomy between the “Western savior” model and the “only local knowledge” model. Knowledge can be co-constructed and, as scholars, we feel, in line with what Asiedu et al. (2025) propose, we have the responsibility to find ways to foster collaboration and cross-fertilization – to braid different knowledge structures in a mutually respectful way (Kimmerer, 2013).

For instance, in Sri Lanka, we collaborated with a local professor of entrepreneurship in all phases of the project. He conducted qualitative interviews with us in the diagnosis and final phases and worked with us throughout the entire project. We co-designed the training with local trainers and entrepreneurship support organizations, and the local staff of the international NGO. In multiple iterations, we tested our assumptions about the problem and potential solutions, worked to develop more contextually appropriate materials, and tested resonance.

We see this co-creation movement with local actors as mutually beneficial. The participatory approaches we implement not only better ground knowledge and perspectives but also diminish the hierarchical relationships between researchers and participants (Konadu-Osei et al., 2022; Moore, 2015) and contribute to the reflexivity of both. In this way, we as researchers seek not to exploit local actors as field sites but attempt to create mutually beneficial projects that give voice to participants and address issues they see as important (Konadu-Osei et al., 2022). In Sri Lanka, our training materials were used after the intervention by local trainers in their own businesses because they were so moved by the resonance they had with micro-entrepreneurs, and micro-entrepreneurs wanted to share the ideas with others because they were directly applicable to their lives.

Adopting a distributed experimentation mindset (Ferraro et al., 2015), our approach uses randomized trials to experiment with different types of intervention before the lead NGO³ and local organizations scale their own interventions. While randomized experiments are often criticized by researchers of decolonization for having low engagement/low reflexivity (extractive approach in our classification), the first two phases of our research ensure that our approach is high in both. We collect baseline data and post-intervention data to see which interventions are more effective in achieving the results previously defined with the local partners. Experimenting together allows us to engage more deeply with our partners and learn together before deploying full interventions. In Sri Lanka, rural entrepreneurs felt empowered to innovate in their businesses because we linked conducting low-risk experiments in their businesses to the low-risk experiments they conducted when they cooked, which seemed to add playfulness to their experience of innovating –they claimed to enjoy it very much.

In this journey, clashes between different forms of knowledge became apparent, and despite being uncomfortable, we discussed them. As pointed out by James et al. (this volume), differences between the dominant Western entrepreneurship paradigm and other approaches are sometimes incompatible. They contend that we should strive to work with multiple knowledge systems in “ways where neither is subsumed by the other but allowing for the enrichment of each knowledge system independently.” The only way this can be possible is with sustained engagement, where researchers and local actors learn from each other by studying reality from different perspectives. As Henry (2025) states, it is important to critically attend to the Western dimensions present in the researcher’s frames and concepts. In Sri Lanka, local trainers deeply resisted our proposal to test the intervention that compared innovating in business to innovating in domestic areas – the examples we used did not fit their (arguably Western-inspired) conceptions of entrepreneurship. We took the time to understand their arguments and adapted our approach with their examples and ideas to make sure that the intervention would reflect their views, yet we also explained why we felt connecting to local domestic examples might be beneficial. We tested the domestic approach against the more traditional approach that they were more comfortable with, experimenting together (Slade Shantz et al., 2024). In the development of interventions, the right to speak (Spivak, 1988), to think (Moyo & Mutsvairo, 2018), and to act in line with one’s own conceptualizations of meaningful change should be ensured (Saldanha et al., 2022).

Achieving impact is a relational and recursive process (Wegener et al., 2024). To increase learning, all our projects incorporate a phase of post-mortem discussion with our partners to understand what worked well and what should be improved before scaling. Prior to recommending the scaling of the intervention, we conduct a final qualitative phase to better understand experimental results. Interviews are conducted with a sample of participants to refine results and understand root causes of changes in behavior through the training intervention. Results are then taken by the lead NGO and local partners and scaled to thousands of marginalized entrepreneurs in the same context experiencing similar challenges. In this sense, we as researchers are co-responsible for what is deployed later. For instance, our research project in Sri Lanka was developed in the first year of a 5-year project. Although we conducted our research on just 500 rural entrepreneurs, our results were used to inform the scaling of the intervention to another 8,000 Sri Lankan entrepreneurs.

This learning phase is key in the way we conduct partnerships and undertake reflexive practices. For instance, in Tunisia, the program we offered was marketed as a “women’s empowerment” program. Some entrepreneurs faced barriers because of this labeling: their husbands would not allow them to participate. Our local partner took the time and the measures to provide the required support for those women in distress and secure their right of participation if they wanted. Even with these measures, some women could not continue the program. Learning from this experience made us think about how we can better work with families (particularly husbands) when we develop projects for women entrepreneurs. This is an example that reminds us of the risks that research in the Global South can have for individuals (Chrispal, this volume) and that we should learn from what went wrong to refine our assumptions (van Wijk et al., 2020).

Another important element in the scaling phase is that there are no property rights over the training programs. Local actors are free to use those materials to scale the programs in the ways they find appropriate. Our commitment to local impact drives our research efforts, and this practice ensures long-term engagement with local actors. We understand that much research with vulnerable populations has produced little benefit for them, increasing suspicions of future collaborations (James et al., this volume). Our own experience makes clear that research that aims to contest the root causes of grand challenges and make a significant impact is much more time and resource-consuming (Wegener et al., 2024), which probably inhibits many researchers from taking this approach (Auerbach et al., this volume). There may be trade-offs between practically addressing grand challenges such as poverty and producing research for top-tier journals, as the latter requires significant contributions to academic theory, which may not coincide with solutions to practical challenges (Kistruck & Slade Shantz, 2022). In addition, as Zoogah et al. (this volume) note, resources and efforts are needed to decolonize organizational theories and decenter their effects on the production and dissemination of knowledge from the Global South (Henry, this volume; Naude, 2019). It is not solely about enabling those labeled as “subaltern” to speak (Spivak, 1988), but also “to speak unproblematically”, and allow for epistemic pluralism in terms of knowledge production and dissemination (Zoogah et al., this volume). Following Asiedu et al. (this volume), Western management research institutions should participate in this decolonial turn and enable economic, social, and cultural decolonial transformative processes.

We have proposed that researchers move beyond extractive, decolonial evaluative, and traditional collaborative types of research to more reflexive pragmatist approaches to enable more equitable research and more impactful, long-lasting, and contextually sensitive practice. Pairing a reflexive and engaged approach (Bhopal, 2010; Chrispal, this volume; De Smet & Boroş, 2021; Konadu-Osei et al., 2022; Uda, this volume) with a pragmatist orientation (Gehman et al., 2022; Wegener et al., 2024), we see our SEED research projects as a way to support international development organizations in co-developing and spreading knowledge that can be used again in future localized and co-created experiments. Taking seriously the idea that entrepreneurship is social change rather than simply economic development (Calás et al., 2009), we believe that it is possible to be reflexive and to co-create social change with local people, deliberately and cautiously, in a way that works with local values, practices and epistemologies and challenges marginalization and the power structures that reproduce it at the same time.

As scholars, we have the capacity and the responsibility to impact many lives in positive ways as we seek to address grand challenges like poverty. We need to accept this responsibility in a concerted effort with other stakeholders, not to impose Western practices but instead to braid local knowledge and Indigenous institutions, values, and practices (Zoogah et al., this volume) with what we know from other settings, in co-creation efforts with local actors (Henry, this volume). We will make mistakes along the way. Yet, let’s not be afraid to assume this responsibility because of the risk of error or critique. We believe that experiments, whether successful or not, are learning opportunities (Ginting – Szczesny et al., this volume). They are a fundamental part of addressing grand challenges (Ferraro et al., 2015). As long as we adopt a continuous, incremental learning mindset (Asiedu et al., this volume), and a reflexive pragmatist approach involving both reflexivity and engagement with local actors, we can make progress on addressing grand challenges.

The intention of this paper was not to provide a complete roadmap for research as the sole form of intervention to alleviate poverty. Instead, it should be interpreted as principles we consciously apply to each new project we start. These principles are in constant evolution, and we purposefully build on our learnings with an outlook that improving reflexivity and real engagement with local actors is unfinished business.