Institutional contradictions and opportunities: How marginalized women farmers engage in bottom-up institution-building

How can marginalized individuals alter institutional schemas that propel discrimination, unfairness and injustice? From an Embedded Agency perspective, marginalized actors are inherently motivated to oppose dominant prejudices, but lack power and resources to instigate change. Yet, based on institutional micro-foundations, we posit that even marginalized individuals can be considered legitimate change agents for specific institutional practices. Through an ethnography of 76 discriminated women farmers in South-West Cameroon, this article shows the processes through which marginalized individuals can build inclusive institutions regardless of their peripheral position within the societal hierarchy. We find that the institutionalized practices of farmers’ and women’s discrimination differ in their ease of alterability and introduce ‘acceptable deviance’, the contextualized possibility to change an institution depending on the individual’s situational legitimacy and the community’s openness to accept changes in that institution. These insights contribute to the discussions of opportunities in institutional entrepreneurship and bottom-up solutions to grand challenges.