Authors: Christian Osita Godson, Ebubechukwu Osita Godson
Abstract: How can durable economic coordination emerge where formal state capacity is weak, uneven, or distrusted? This article develops portable institutionalism through an historically informed analysis of Igbo socioeconomic institutions in southeastern Nigeria and their reproduction across locations. It conceptualises Igbonisation as the bounded empirical process through which apprenticeship, associational governance, relational finance, reputation, and informal dispute resolution travel with participants and are reconstructed in new commercial settings. The argument bridges micro-level accounts of indigenous entrepreneurship and macro-level theories of state capacity by identifying a meso-institutional architecture that lowers transaction costs, circulates skills and capital, and supports enterprise regeneration. The article further introduces networked resilience to explain how mutually reinforcing human, social, institutional, and reputational resources absorb shocks and reproduce productive capacity. The framework neither romanticises informality nor treats relational governance as a substitute for capable states: exclusion, hierarchy, regulatory evasion, and limits to technological upgrading define its boundary conditions. Portable institutionalism contributes to institutional economics by showing how institutions can be territorially mobile, socially enforced, and developmentally consequential beyond the formal organisations of the state.
DOI: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21455086
