ENTREPRENEURIAL ECOSYSTEM FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH: TERRITORIES, ANCESTRAL KNOWLEDGE AND THE PLURIVERSE IN LATIN AMERICA
The symposium calls for researchers in economics, development studies, indigenous studies and related disciplines, as well as representatives of communities, public entities, businesses and social organizations. By bringing together academic perspectives, territorial experiences and organizational practices, this space seeks to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of entrepreneurial ecosystems in Latin America, promoting critical dialogue on development, economic justice, and the place of ancestral knowledge in shaping alternatives for well-being.
The central purpose of the symposium is to debate how different forms of entrepreneurship—individual, indigenous, artisanal, community-based, and energy-related—emerge, overlap, or come into tension within these ecosystems, and what implications they have for territorial economic development in Latin America. In this sense, the aim is to identify what economic-institutional arrangements, business models, and forms of governance allow for the articulation of financial resources, human capital, regulatory frameworks, and ancestral knowledge in a more equitable, sustainable, and culturally legitimate manner.
The symposium’s structure is organized around three thematic axes. First, it addresses the entrepreneurial ecosystem in emerging economies, analyzing structural and subjective dimensions of the environment and its relationship to business creation. Second, it examines indigenous and artisanal economies in different Latin American territories, exploring how practices based on barter, reciprocity, and cultural legacy are transformed as they are inserted into market-oriented value chains and entrepreneurship-support programs, reconfiguring gender roles, income, and the meanings of work. Third, it analyzes pluriversal entrepreneurship as a space for dialogue among diverse actors who, based on their identities and cosmologies, drive forms of community enterprise, energy projects, social economy initiatives, and experiences of buen vivir in different territories of Latin America.
The discussion is grounded in relevant empirical experiences from the region, including contexts where high productive potential, indigenous and popular economies, institutional weakness, and socio-environmental conflicts converge. Based on these cases, it will analyze how public, private, academic, and community actors co-produce entrepreneurial ecosystems that can either reproduce power asymmetries or open spaces for economic self-determination, the preservation of ancestral knowledge, and the construction of pluriversal futures. The emphasis will be on understanding the economic effects of these configurations on income, local productive structures, access to basic services, and territorial resilience, and on discussing their implications for development and entrepreneurship-support policies in Latin America.
The symposium calls for researchers in economics, development studies, indigenous and Afro-descendant studies, decolonial studies, and related disciplines, as well as representatives of communities, public entities, businesses, social organizations, and entrepreneurship networks in the region. By bringing together academic perspectives, territorial experiences, and organizational practices, this space seeks to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of entrepreneurial ecosystems in Latin America, promoting critical dialogue on development, economic justice, and the place of ancestral knowledge and collective identities in shaping alternatives for well-being.
