Possible Role of Universities in Shortening the Timescale of Change of Social Embeddedness through Participatory Actions

Resources addressed in this work are human and social ones. They are integral parts of the institutional arrangements domain from the rural web concept. Institutional arrangements are drawn parallel with New Institutional Economics (NIE) in this study. Inside NIE the paper focuses on Social embeddedness. Social embeddedness as the first level of the institutions is understood as Mental Models in this paper. The literature underlines that Social embeddedness is the level of the institutions where longest timescale is needed for change. The study tries to examine if participatory actions initiated by Universities, helping generating dialogues and discussions, can shorten the timescale of social embeddedness so as to improve the results of rural development policies. The methods used along the paper are case studies, where the authors of the paper carry out participatory actions in a region of the North Great Plain Region of Hungary. In our paper we discuss that different participatory actions (rural action learning, participatory action research, participatory video etc.) could shorten the period of change on level one and also examine and underline the role of Universities in this process.