Abstract
Over the past two decades, transnationally networked actors have promoted a vision of transforming African agriculture from an object of poverty-alleviating development assistance to a motor of economic growth by integrating smallholders into markets and promoting agribusiness through multi-stakeholder initiatives. Munro and Schurman analyze the networking and communicative labor that key policy actors have performed to advance this vision. An institutional and ideational architecture for this project is created by defining agricultural challenges in specific ways, imbuing particular ideas with authority and establishing strategic institutional connections. This architecture constitutes an emerging governance regime for African agriculture, but its long-term prospects remain uncertain.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 16-40 |
| Number of pages | 25 |
| Journal | African Studies Review |
| Volume | 65 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We wish to acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation (grant # 1539833) for funding this research. We also thank our project collaborators, Tom Bassett, Heidi Gengenbach, and Bill Moseley for sharing expertise and fieldwork that helped sharpen our account. We received excellent research assistance from Lilli Ambort, Emily Schirmacher, David Werner, and Tatum Zsorey. We also thank three anonymous reviewers for incisive comments on an earlier draft of this article.
Funding Information:
8. This figure represents total Agricultural Development grants through May 2020, calculated using the BMGF’s grant awards data base.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the African Studies Association.
Keywords
- Africa development
- African agriculture
- African Green Revolution
- transnational policy networks
