Knowledge Resources

A resilient meso space to enable an adaptive Systemic Competitiveness landscape Over the past few years, Mesopartner has been working on different topics in its meso research theme.

Adaptive management Adaptive management has caused quite a buzz in development. At the same time, many practitioners, particularly those who have been around for a while, see it more as common sense…

The starting point of this GTZ paper is the observation that private sector development (PSD) and agricultural economic development (AED) have historically been two distinct approaches in development cooperation. 

The International Network on Quality Infrastructure, recently defined Quality Infrastructure (Ql) as: "the system comprising the organisations (public and private), policies, relevant legal and regulatory frameworks and practices required to support and improve the quality,…

Assessment of meso organisations for opportunities for improvement Meso organisations are established to promote economic development and improve competitiveness of a region by responding to a…

INEF Report. Project Meso-NRW. North Rhine-Westphalia: Structural Economic Change, Regional Economic and Locational Policy, Ecological Formulation of State Policy - A Survey from the Viewpoint of Advanced Developing Countries...

Read 5 blog posts by Dr Shawn Cunningham on building technological capability

Read 3 blog posts by Dr Shawn Cunningham on knowledge and innovation

We are being increasingly approached to assist cities and large towns with bottom-up innovation and industrial policies in developing countries.

The Local and Provincial Economic Development (LPED) Project, initially planned for three years (June 2019 – May 2022), aimed to improve the framework conditions for economic development in eleven selected municipalities and three provinces in Nepal...

The following guideline for designing a participatory approach to organisational strategy development of Business Membership Organisations (BMO) was first used to support the provincial chapters of the Federation of Nepalese Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FNCCI) in their restructuring process...

This toolbox is complementary to the Calidena Handbook 2.0 and differentiates between tools according to the phases of the process: ■ Preparatory tools ■ Workshop tools ■ Follow-up tools ■ Training tools Each tool is presented first in an overview table designed to provide a quick orientation, then followed by a more detailed description and a step-by-step guide to the procedure.

Climate change and planetary boundaries are global challenges, which require that all countries recognise the need to transform their economies and take action.

“Made in Saerbeck” and not “Made in Germany” was a brand used by two companies involved in supplying renewable energy products in Germany to demonstrate their local heritage.

A review of the Connective Cities/COVID-19 program's Climate-neutral Urban Development led by Mesopartner.

The Compass of Local Competitiveness

The Compass of Local Competitiveness The Compass of Local Competitiveness Pocket Guide The Pocket Guide for Compass of Local Competitiveness is a…

Different development programmes have different priorities and goals. Some promote economic development, competitiveness and growth. Some promote green economic development.

UNU-MERIT Working Paper. Quality Infrastructure (QI) is defined as the system comprising organizations (public and private), policies, legal and regulatory frameworks, and practices that support and enhance

the quality, safety, and environmental feature of goods, services, and processes. 

The idea of developing the economy of a sub-national region is not new. For many, the development of the local economy is seen as an antidote to globalisation.

Mesopartner has supported the UK Department for International Development (DFID) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to make sense of how they can use technology support to support their private sector development work.

There are many efforts at present all around the world to “green” rural locations and cities. Entry points are manifold, and the driving forces often differ in more and less developed countries.

The traditional approach to competitiveness is based on labour or capital productivity (Porter, 1989). Given the over-exploitation of natural resources, today we can observe a changing basis of competitive advantage (Von Weizsäcker, De Larderel, Hargroves et al., 2014).

Explore, Scale Up, Move Out: Three Phases to Managing Change under Conditions of Uncertainty IDS Bulletin.

Facilitation and change of meso organisations This article reflects on selected experiences gained from the project Competitive Regional Economic Development (CREDO) in Krajina, funded by the Swedish…

Fostering dynamic entrepreneurial innovation ecosystems In the natural sciences, an ecosystem is understood as a system of interconnected elements, formed by a community of organisms interacting with…

The paper takes the form of a literature study on the topic of technological change, innovation and building technological capabilities.

We have been working on the promotion of innovation systems since the early days of Mesopartner.

While value chains and product networks are often optimised for efficiency at the levels of products, firms and transactions, the overall systems they form part of may not be optimally efficient from a resource utilisation perspective.

Quality Infrastructure provides a foundation for economic development Quality Infrastructure (QI) provides the necessary foundation for the economic development of any country. ...

In the context of international trade, accreditation is the formal attestation or statement by an independent third party (the accreditation body, AB) that a conformity assessment body (CAB) or calibration laboratory (CL) is competent to carry out a specific conformity assessment or calibration services.

Due to the growing importance of QI worldwide, stakeholders inside and outside the QI ecosystem are becoming more interested in reliable data and information on their development status. This interest goes hand in hand with the increasing digitalisation of the economy and society, which QI institutions must consider.

The Impact of Quality Infrastructure on Global Value Chain participation Sustainable development involves the strengthening of local firms. The continuous improvement in processes, products and functions to increase value added, that the literature and the policy practice have called firms’ upgrading, is absolutely essential for emerging economies to compete sustainably in global markets.

Quality infrastructure (QI) is still a young phenomenon, even though its constitutive elements, such as metrology, standardization and conformity assessment, have existed for over a hundred years. Accreditation, the most recent QI element, emerged after the Second World War and can look back on almost 80 years of development.

This study analyses the coverage of accreditation services provided to multiple Conformity Assessment Bodies (CABs) across the country’s various productive sectors. A relationship is established between the accreditation schemes offered by ONAC (Organismo Nacional de Acreditación de Colombia, the National Accreditation Body in Colombia) and economic activities according to the International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC).

This report, which utilises data collected during the year 2025, is the fourth in a series documenting the global development of QI. The previous reports are based on data from 2020, 2021 and 2023. 

Accreditation is a cornerstone of quality infrastructure, supporting trade, regulatory compliance, and economic growth by ensuring conformity assessment bodies meet international standards. Yet no standardized metric has existed to measure accreditation capability over time...

Gaining Systemic Insight when facing complexity In our 2019 Annual Reflections we described the Systemic Insight process logic, a template for a process of search and discovery that we developed in…

...provided by the global value chain...

To understand how to influence economic development in a territory to make it “greener”, one needs to appreciate how change happens in the economy in general.

Have you ever wondered why some companies, industries or even places appear to be more able to innovate and harness new knowledge, while others are lagging or stagnant?

How to identify meso organisations Although it is quite easy to find enterprises in most locations and industries, it is sometimes harder to find meso organisations that provide key technological…

Since it was established in 2003, Mesopartner has been involved in work related to Local Economic Development (LED).

Identifying the meso organisations that strengthen technological capability During the past year, Mesopartner has been working with the Trade and Industrial Policy Strategies (TIPS) and the…

Migration is essential to human development and has contributed towards altering societies and economies for thousands of years.

Improving the resolution of the meso layer: a case study When working to improve the performance of any sector or value chain, we often find a range of meso organisations or programmes designed to…

The publication "Indonesia's and Germany's QI Systems at a Glance: A Comparative Analysis” provides a detailed analysis of the Quality Infrastructure (QI) systems and laws of both countries.

Innovation requirements of a climate-smart location

During 2018 and 2019 we were asked by different regional governance and private sector development projects in the Ukraine and Peru to identify key procedures and learnings from regional growth pole (RGP) strategies and institution-building processes in East Germany.

As economic development practitioners, we often wonder how emerging technological and social changes might affect the people we work with. How will new technologies affect the regions and value chains we work with?

Just (Energy) Transition as an interdisciplinary transformation challenge: Learning from the German experience The Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) commissioned Mesopartner PartG to summarize Germany’s Just Transition experience focusing on economic structural change and coal phase-out in selected regions of Germany.

A discussion paper by Dr Shawn Cunningham & Frank Waeltring was commissioned by the GIZ Sector project “Development Orientated Trade and Investment Policy and Promotion” on behalf of the BMZ.

In recent editions of the Annual Reflection, particularly in the 2015 Annual Reflection, we discussed Local Economic Development (LED) intensively. We have also occasionally discussed Market System Development (MSD).

In November 2021, Mesopartner and a group of friends organised an online dialogue series. We invited a diverse group to jointly reimagine what we mean by “place” and how we approach this concept.

As part of it’s support for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation’s (SDC) employment and income (e+i) network, Marcus Jenal of Mesopartner contributed to the development of an overview of current thinking and practice in Local Economic Development (LED).  

Public Private Cooperative Dialogue (PPCD) is a means to an end and seeks to make companies and cooperatives more competitive and sustainable while generating prosperity and ensuring inclusive processes that involve municipalities and other local communities (The Cluster Competitiveness Group, 2011).

The World Economic Forum (WEF) is raising the awareness of global leaders about the expected societal changes as the Fourth Industrial Revolution expands.

This paper focuses on meso organisations and policies that strengthen the technological capability of the country or industry to enable change, adaptation and economic resilience.

Meso level, meso space and the relation to territories Even at the beginning of the 1990s, many scholars realised that competition between isolated firms, unconditional free trade, and the state as…

Meso organisations assessment framework

Meso organisations need to be innovative and anticipate future trends Meso organisations need to be innovative because their management style and creative use of resources infuses the system with…

This report describes a research survey focused on the micro-narratives of producers about their efforts to improve the quality of the essential and vegetable oils they produce.

Industrial policy is a multidimensional term combining a number of different policy fields at a number of levels. As a result, political control suffers.

To become an effective change agent in dynamic systems, continuous learning and adjusting are essential. Interventions should not only be assessed retrospectively but continuously, so that they can be adapted on an ongoing basis.

The Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago (GORTT) herein presents its National Quality Policy (NQP).

Development practitioners are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that their work is relevant and that it contributes to sustainably addressing key challenges. There are many different ways to capture and report achievements. 

Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt Braunschweig und Berlin National Metrology Institute Calidena Toolbox Support material for the Calidena Handbook 2.0 INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION

The manual is complete handbook on how to conduct a Participatory Appraisal of Competitive Advantage (PACA) exercise in the context of Nepal.

This Africa Insight article interrogates the planning-driven approach to LED and contrasts it with an evolutionary approach.

We live in a time of disruptive change. How to activate our capacity to lean into the emerging future may well be the most crucial leadership challenge of our time. How do you cultivate curiosity, compassion and courage in the face of prejudice, anger and fear?” 

This article draws on our experience in promoting innovation systems in developing countries.

Technical assistance has a tendency to address technology and innovation in an implicit way, as something that is elementary in creating or strengthening productive sectors and services in latecomer countries.

Rapid Diagnostic Tool (RDT) is an instrument that helps quality infrastructure (QI) stakeholders and donor institutions assess the supply side of a QI ecosystem in a specific country.

In 2015 the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which provides a framework for peace and prosperity for the planet and its people. 

Information Flyer on the methodology RACCA for rapid appraisals of climate-sensitive city initiatives. A Climate-sensitive approach for city development.

In order to assess the feasibility of a possible future project ‘Responsible Tourism and Competitiveness in Vietnam’ envisaged by the Swiss Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) for funding, the ILO has commissioned the preparation of a rapid market assessment (RMA) of…

In 2006, mesopartner was commissioned by the European Union–Vietnam Private Sector Support Programme (EU-VPSSP) to develop a methodology for Regional Economic Potential Analysis and the supervision of its first application in the three provinces Hai Phong, Da Nang and Can Tho.…

This booklet is about the accomplishments of the Local and Provincial Economic Development Programme (LPED) implemented by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH from June 2019 to April 2023.

Quality infrastructure as an emerging research field. The concept of quality infrastructure (QI) describes the system of metrology, standardization, accreditation, and conformity assessment, which contributes to the safety and quality of products and supports international…

In Article 9 of this Annual Reflection, Strengthening technological capability, two important sub-systems at the meso level are mentioned.

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, Professor of Regional Planning at the London School of Economics (LSE), has recently contributed to the public debate on the connection between populism and regions (Rodríguez-Pose, 2018).

Rethinking systemic change: economic evolution and institutions In this work, we question the utility of the concept of systemic change in market systems development as it is currently used and…

In this work, we question the utility of the concept of systemic change in market systems development as it is currently used and suggest that we need a rethink. Systems continuously change and evolve, also without external development actors.

Returning to basic principles: Common denominators of the Mesopartner and the EU smart specialization approaches Common denominators between the Mesopartner philosophy and the smart specialisation…

In 2016, all 193 UN member states signed the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also named “Transformation Agenda 2030”. In contrast to its forerunner, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the SDGs not only focus on providing targets for developing countries but also…

Adjusting the business environment of a country or territory to the new realities of climate change and environmental degradation is complex.

What constitutes the "smart" element of a space or a place? We argue that “smart” does not equal digitisation. But if "smart" is not necessarily associated with digital solutions, what does it mean then?

‘Smartes Land’ is the heading under which Mesopartner started to reflect on how to promote innovation orientation in rural areas in the European Union (EU) through multidisciplinary innovation promotion approaches. 

This article is a summary of a research paper that Mesopartner was commissioned to write for Trade and Industry Policy Strategies (TIPS) on behalf of the Department of Trade and Industry in South Africa.

Why compare the Mexican and German QI systems? As part of this endeavour, it is vital to under- stand the similarities and differences between the QI systems of different countries.

Systemic change: evolving conditions that hold a situation in place Under the Systemic Change research theme, we are researching, developing and applying concepts that help development practitioners…

Many international donor programmes have growth and employment as their prime objectives and performance targets. Impact-level indicators usually cover the number of full-time equivalent jobs created and net-attributable income change.

In this interview (and videocast) we will be talking with Prof. Dr Dirk Messner about a question that has been keeping us busy for a while now: In our work, how can we promote a more sustainable and transformative way of territorial development, and what systemic perspectives.

The national chambers of commerce and industry play a key role in representing and promoting private sector interests worldwide. They provide the necessary guidance and support to their members – the businesses that they represent, especially in structural change processes and transition. 

This paper highlights the critical role of Quality Infrastructure (Ql) as a foundation for trade, competitiveness, economic development, regulatory compliance, and economic complexity. It underscores the interconnected nature of key QI components-metrology, standardization, accreditation, and conformity assessment-emphasizing the need to approach Ql as a cohesive system rather than a collection of separate elements. 

The Guiding principle in SME Promotion: Remedy Market Failure, Enable Markets

What is the potential and the relevance of Quality Infrastructure (QI) for innovations in developing countries? The working group “Promoting Innovation Systems”, funded by the International Technical Cooperation PTB, is investigating this question, aiming at integrating the…

Both the value chain and the circular economy concept have their unique attractiveness. In the 2016 Annual Reflection we published the article From value chains to circular economic systems (Cunningham, Jenal & Harmes-Liedtke, 2016), where we argue that value chains often…

The emergence of a meso space – Country Case Myanmar As is typical for a country such as Myanmar, which only started a transformation process in 2012 after decades of isolation, business…

The transformation to a green economy is more than a purely technical issue. It requires a shift in the mindset of people in very different societies around the globe.