Researches on local productive systems pass through a large divulgation in the last years and today are part of industrial development politics. The difficulty in the approach of these systems is the evaluation of the adopted governances with an efficient methodology, which considerer not only the formal relationships but also the informal ones. The use of transaction costs approach together with the convention economy, social capital and institutional environment is an alternative tool to evaluate governance systems used by members of local productive systems. The methodology allows to evaluate the adoption of all kind of governance systems, formal or informal. The methodology also enable to consider the importance of territory as a factor responsible for the creation of social capital and conventions, variables responsible for the decrease of risk, an important characteristic of transactions.
conventions; transaction cost; local productive systems; governances
