Institutions and Agrarian Development

Many African countries have reached quite impressive economic growth rates since the mid-1990s. However, the gains have been unequally divided and have been diluted by population growth. Scattered islands of economic improvement are set in an “ocean” of countries mired in extreme poverty and social dislocation. Persistent poverty correlates with high rates of population growth. African economic weakness means that not enough jobs are created for a burgeoning younger generation, many of whom have set their sights on North-bound emigration. And yet, Africa has abundant (agrarian) resources. Why has this not led to growth and poverty reduction? A number of explanations have been advanced to explain the failure of West African agriculture to catalyse far-reaching economic change. In this book, we focus on institutional factors. Institutional constraints, we argue, permeate and shape these other constraints. They have a logic and dynamic of their own. Institutions are important and need to be addressed in their own right. Any fuller understanding of the potential for African agrarian change requires sustained attention to the institutional dynamics of agrarian society and economy.

This chapter provides a short review of current debates about institutions, focusing on the economist’s and the anthropologist’s perspective. We start with narratives by economists on the origins and evolution of institutions (e.g. transaction costs and efficiency, the struggle between different social groups). We then augment the conventional focus on markets and hierarchy (Oliver Williamson) by introducing a four-field framework for analysing institutions, which is developed along two axes: the group—and the grid dimension. This framework, proposed by Douglas, has gained little traction in economics until now, but we show how it can be useful to understand institutional dynamics in rural development in West Africa.

We discuss customary institutional arrangements governing the mobilization and allocation of production factors. This includes a description of agricultural production in West Africa, followed by an in-depth discussion of how institutions interlink with the allocation and accumulation of land, labour, and capital. Social bonds play an important role in mobilizing capital, where access to markets and formal financial systems are low. The key resources for agricultural productivity are land and labour. We look at the role of chiefs and family descent groups (or clans) in regulating user rights to land. We show both how, historically, agrarian servitude helped overcome labour bottlenecks, and how today, labour mobilization sometimes takes place via the judicial system.

Chieftaincy is a key institutional feature in Upper West Africa. We discuss how various levels of chiefs serve as brokers between all four of elementary institutional orderings. Especially, chieftaincy links the formal government hierarchy and the village enclave. We provide both a historical and contemporary account of chiefs and delve into their role in the success (or failure) of development projects, look at attempts to transform chieftaincy through attempts to make chiefs more inclusive and democratic, and their important role in helping communities cope with shocks, such as the Ebola virus crisis of 2014–2015.

This chapter is based on ongoing projects in the region. It considers the “clashing of institutions” paradigm in more detail. We assess four case studies. We look at how the expansion of commercial agrarian activity impacts the enclave rural community and study the impact of a large-scale agrarian direct foreign investment project in biofuels in rural Sierra Leone. A second case assesses the clash between hierarchical ordering and the enclave and highlights how communities coped with the international top-down response to the recent outbreak of the Ebola Virus Disease. We then look at a new form of institutional hybridity brought about by the expansion of markets that helped to pacify rebellious rural youth in Liberia and Sierra Leone. As an aside, we discuss how the advance of markets impacted on community norms and witchcraft accusations. A fourth case shows how attempts to commercialize agriculture may fail, and highlights the need for a better grasp of institutional hybridity.

Institutions should not be viewed with simplistic qualifications of “good” and “poor.” Instead, careful attention is needed to where institutions come from and how they change. This includes reflecting on our own viewpoints and a need to shift our focus from a snapshot picture to a dynamic and “bottom-up” one. Douglas’ fourfold institutional ordering is useful here. Institutions are on the move, so what transformations can we expect? We highlight some promising directions. There is a need to create more space for, and to pay careful attention to, this kind of local institutional experimentation.

Agrarian transformations have been an important part of the story of economic development all over the world. This book began by posing a question: Why have agrarian opportunities not contributed more to poverty alleviation in sub-Saharan Africa? We focused on a case-study region—the forest margins of Upper West Africa—because we wanted to set aside factors such as drought and population pressure, in order to focus on the issue of institutional dynamics. Much recent analysis of governance and development has focused on the crucial significance of institutional dynamics as factors in progressive improvement. Strong evidence has already been presented that a succession of rebellions and civil wars in Upper West Africa at the end of the twentieth century reflected an institutional crisis. Moreover, this crisis seems to have significant local roots, since war affected three neighbouring countries with different histories of colonial intervention. Perhaps the history of institutional dynamics across a region subject to a common set of organizational drivers would help explain the present underperformance of agriculture as a driver of beneficial economic change, and account for a modern slave trade—in which young people from the region, desperate for meaningful work, are prepared to put themselves in the hands of people smugglers in order to reach Europe, rather than turn inwards and look for successful and fulfilling employment on an agrarian frontier in their own backyard.