The growing concerns about food security, especially in the disadvantaged regions of the world, often point out the inadequacies of strictly sectoral approaches to addressing the problems of agriculture. Such policy approaches coincided with the rise of a global, top-down, formal, science-driven development of agriculture. Over time, such interventions have drawn criticism from multiple corners as inadequately addressing the need for local variation in institutional contexts. The objective of this paper is to adopt a bottom-up perspective to address the need for cross-sectorality in food security policies. Sustainable Rural Livelihood (SRL) and Grassroots Innovation (GI) are two well recognized schools of thought which emphasize the cross-sectoral approaches to livelihood and local level problem-solving. By embracing a frugality lens, we can offer a conceptual regularity in the patterns of behaviour and decision-making highlighted by the SRL and GI schools of thought. Taking a step further, the frugality lens, by focusing on the usefulness of a decision in the actual environment, emphasizes the need to diagnose local institutions better. Note, however, that the contention of the current paper is not to posit 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' as two competing paradigms. It only argues that a frugality lens helps us to better appreciate the strengths of a bottom-up approach for effective policy formulation, an appreciation of which would promote a dignified marriage between the two perspectives.

While consumer and marketing research in developed markets is an established field, research on consumers in an Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) setting is less established and mostly conceptual or qualitative. This paper examines the individual heterogeneity and the local context of BoP consumers with an empirical study on consumption of low cost bottled water on the Kenyan coast and the capitals of Uganda and Rwanda. The empirical analysis builds on existing research exploring consumer behavior, and it studies a database of 713 bottled water consumers in Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda. Consumers with a higher level of education were less likely to be late consumers. Additionally, early consumers were more likely to purchase due to a purposeful search for a bottled drinking water solution. Since we control for location specific effects we highlight the importance of supply driven consumption in the BoP market. Furthermore, the results suggest that the two water companies may not be reaching their targeted low-income consumers but rather middle class consumers. The research contributes to the larger BoP debate by presenting evidence that consumers in a BoP setting may purchase more on the basis of supply of a product rather than other socio-demographic factors such as income.

In this work we focus on the search phase that precedes the knowledge transfer process. We argue that it is important to closely analyze this phase as, the common understanding of problem developed in this phase has a significant impact on the stages that follow. In this analysis we focus on two key factors: openness and the richness of media of communication that foster the openness within Multinational Corporation (MNC) environment. Furthermore, we also try to explore the degree of knowledge transfer due to an open environment. Openness is a change that can be induced at the MNE level by the Headquarter (HQ), the effects of this change are behavioral in nature and can be observed at the subsidiary level in the type of media of communication used