Léna Prouchet
Léna is a postdoctoral researcher working on the **Rethinking Entrepreneurship in Society** research project.
One of her primary research interests focuses on the engagement of marginalized communities in development initiatives in the Global South, led by external actors such as NGOs, private companies, or governments. Léna examines how these communities receive, adapt to, or resist the strategies and practices promoted by these actors.
Another area of her work explores the potential of entrepreneurship to address grand societal challenges, such as poverty and climate change, particularly in the Global South. Drawing on the concept of “entrepreneurialism”—the study of entrepreneurship as a social and cultural discourse—she investigates why entrepreneurship has become such a dominant framework in development strategies. Her research also evaluates whether entrepreneurship serves as a tool for empowerment or if it perpetuates and deepens social and economic inequalities.
For her PhD, Léna researched development projects initiated by NGOs to promote entrepreneurship within Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon.
Trapped in the Model: Ideological Intermediaries and the Persistence of Failed Entrepreneurship in the Peruvian Amazon
Why do entrepreneurship-for-development programs persist, even when they consistently fail to deliver lasting benefits and when practitioners recognize these failures?
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon, we investigate how development intermediaries sustain belief in failing entrepreneurial models. We identify a recurring deflection cycle composed of three ideological traps—framing failure as progress, overstating isolated successes, and attributing failure to community deficiencies.
These traps do more than justify poor outcomes: they constitute ideological work that enables practitioners to reconcile failure with their development ideals, allowing the ideology of entrepreneurialism to persist not in spite of failure, but through it.
This paper foregrounds the role of intermediaries as ideological infrastructure. Positioned between funders and communities, practitioners translate, absorb, and stabilize externally imposed models at the point of practical friction. We show that their belief in entrepreneurship is not merely cognitive, but affective and moral, expressed through mundane everyday routines. This helps explain why recognition of failure does not lead to reform. Instead of prompting structural change, failure is reinterpreted through ideological frames that foreclose learning and legitimize persistence.
Our findings bridge scholarship on entrepreneurship as a tool for poverty alleviation and research on entrepreneurialism as ideology by theorizing how entrepreneurial ideals are operationalized, defended, and naturalized in everyday practice. We argue that the three ideological traps form a durable infrastructure that displaces accountability and masks systemic misalignment, sustaining models that fail those they intend to serve. Rather than viewing development failure as a technical problem of “scaling what works,” our study highlights the need for ideological reflexivity. Only by interrogating the meaning systems practitioners use to make sense of failure can we begin to imagine alternative, community-defined approaches to entrepreneurship that move beyond the cycle of imposition, disappointment, and deflection.