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‘Demonstration fields’, anticipation, and contestation: agrarian change and the political economy of development corridors in Eastern Africa

Chome, Ngala; Gonçalves, Euclides; Scoones, Ian; Sulle, Emmanuel

‘Demonstration fields’, anticipation, and contestation: agrarian change and the political economy of development corridors in Eastern Africa Thumbnail


Authors

Ngala Chome

Euclides Gonçalves

Ian Scoones

Emmanuel Sulle



Abstract

In much of Eastern Africa, the last decade has seen a renewed interest in spatial development plans that link mineral exploitation, transport infrastructure and agricultural commercialisation. While these development corridors have yielded complex results – even in cases where significant investments are yet to happen – much of the existing analysis continues to focus on economic and implementation questions, where failures are attributed to inappropriate incentives or lack of ‘political will’. Taking a different – political economy – approach, this article examines what actually happens when corridors ‘hit the ground’, with a specific interest to the diverse agricultural commercialisation pathways that they induce. Specifically, the article introduces and analyses four corridors – LAPSSET in Kenya, Beira and Nacala in Mozambique, and SAGCOT in Tanzania – which are generating ‘demonstration fields’, economies of anticipation and fields of political contestations respectively, and as a result, creating – or promising to create – diverse pathways for agricultural commercialisation, accumulation and differentiation. In sum, the article shows how top-down grand-modernist plans are shaped by local dynamics, in a process that results in the transformation of corridors, from exclusivist ‘tunnel’ visions, to more networked corridors embedded in local economies, and shaped by the realities of rural Eastern Africa.

Citation

Chome, N., Gonçalves, E., Scoones, I., & Sulle, E. (2020). ‘Demonstration fields’, anticipation, and contestation: agrarian change and the political economy of development corridors in Eastern Africa. Journal of Eastern African Studies, 14(2), 309-309. https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2020.1743067

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Mar 4, 2020
Online Publication Date Mar 18, 2020
Publication Date 2020
Deposit Date Apr 1, 2020
Publicly Available Date Apr 2, 2020
Journal Journal of Eastern African Studies
Print ISSN 1753-1055
Electronic ISSN 1753-1063
Publisher British Institute in Eastern Africa
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 14
Issue 2
Pages 309-309
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2020.1743067

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Published Journal Article (Advance online version) (1.9 Mb)
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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Advance online version © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.





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