Entrepreneurial Opportunities and Role of Capability Approach in Agribusiness: Evidence from Sri Lanka

Abstract

Development of agribusiness sector entrepreneurship is one of the critical pathways to obtain high economic growth, poverty reduction and environmental protection in developing countries. Gaps remain towards understanding the entrepreneurial behaviour in agribusiness in developing countries. This is driven for research opportunity to underlies the formation of farmers’ entrepreneurial behaviour, with a particular focus on the development of farm entrepreneurship in developing context. Drawing upon the capability approach, the study examines what capabilities influence to explore opportunities and implement them into action and how those identified capabilities influence entrepreneurship growth in agribusiness sector in Sri Lanka. The study adopted an inductive qualitative case study approach to gathering data from the farmers. The analysis produced 17 actions denoted by the selected farmers. These 17 actions were then related to 04 pillars of capabilities conceptualized by literature; organizational learning, communication, sharing and exchanging knowledge and technological capabilities. Drawing upon the capability approach to explore capabilities that require to pursue and develop entrepreneurial opportunities, this study is offered a new perspective on entrepreneurship theory. The study was the cross-sectional and it was only about three cases, signifying a need to include other agribusiness sectors for further contextualizing the results.