Foreign Direct Investment Policy Entrepreneur Resilience Across Regimes in Myanmar

While an extensive body of research exists concerning policy entrepreneurship in the Global North, very little involves cases in the Global South, particularly in unstable political settings. This paper addresses this gap in the literature on policy entrepreneurship in the politically volatile setting of the Global South by examining foreign direct investment policy in Myanmar. The study's theoretical framework is that of Mintrom’s conceptualization of policy entrepreneurial behavior. By assessing observed behaviors of an organization-level policy entrepreneur across three regimes in terms of characteristics identified by Mintrom, the study assesses which characteristics contribute to the policy entrepreneur’s survival across regime changes and regime types. In so doing, it suggests that Mintrom’s framing of entrepreneurial behavior can be expanded to account for entrepreneurial resilience under conditions of political instability. To accomplish this, the study offers evidence on the behavior of an organization-level FDI policy entrepreneur on dimensions and indicators identified by Mintrom across three regime changes from 2011 to 2024 to maintain a discernible policy development and implementation trajectory under conditions of quasi-democratic, democratic, and military-authoritarian governments. The evidence from the study leads to the proposal that Mintrom’s conceptual framework can be revised to include “resilience” as a characteristic to account for the policy entrepreneur’s ability to adapt and survive across changing political and economic circumstances.