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The paper explores the relation of different political economic projects and the development of pensions as a social right in three countries: Sweden, Germany and United Kingdom. It comprises three parts. The first part provides the conceptual framework, which combines a Polanyian perspective for the social embeddedness of markets with a three dimensional power theoretical approach in order to analyse modes of governance as practices of socio-economic regulation. The second part identifies the link between the macro-level of analysis i.e. different political economy logics and modes of governance and the meso-level of analysis i.e. the institutional paths that these countries have followed in developing their pensions systems and what used to be and currently is the role of occupational pension funds in them. This type of funds offers a prime example of how institutions that originally developed within a logic of social rights have now become actors in the economy. The decision-making of this new actor is however depended on the power relations between labour and capital in each country. The third part of the paper continues to show how the institutional paths have departed from their national spatio-temporal fix and have been re-embedded in the market-economy rationale of the neo-liberal project. The paper identifies a trend towards the ?equitisation? of pension funds as part of a broader process of marketisation of pensions as social right. The significance of the investment decision for pension occupational funds becomes crucial since funds are becoming major actors in the economic field. Their investment decision depends much on power relations between labour and capital ranging for example from social development (public houses, creation of jobs in the national environment) to the creation of profits through domestic and foreign financial markets. The paper concludes that pension occupational funds are re-embedded in a framework of choices, dominated increasingly more from the market economy rationale and the neo-liberal political project. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]