Agricultural investments transform state-society relations

Recent studies have acknowledged the important role of state authorities in facilitating investments into land. However, these investments also transform the state itself. In an article in a recent special section in Geoforum,Tom Lavers, researcher at ILO,and Festus Boamah, post-doc researcher at the University of Bayreuth,contribute to our understanding of investments and state capacity by analyzing two cases that feature prominently in the ‘land grab’ debates: Ethiopia and Ghana.

Overall, they argue, the effect of investments depends on existing patterns of state formation. In highly centralized Ethiopia, the state is using agricultural investment to build state capacity. In Ghana it is instead the traditional chiefs who have taken advantage of investment opportunities to strengthen their position, in turn, limiting the state’s ability to regulate investments.

Whereas much of the existing literature has been based on either single case studies or large data-sets, they write, it is only by developing a more comparative analytical approach that we can grasp the connections between investments and state capacity. The mutual relations between the two change authority over land in unforeseen ways. The paper outlines an analytical framework for understanding these variations in national investment experiences.