Economic Enterprises and their Critics: Efforts to Mitigate the Negative Impact of Large-Scale Agricultural Investments in Africa

• Applicant: Dr. Tijo Salverda
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 353613876

Agricultural investments in Africa are under substantial pressure from an international movement of critics that has raised concerns about the negative impact of large-scale land acquisition and commercial agriculture in the Global South. Investors often have to respond to these concerns, to the extent that they may feel pressured to (partly) change their practices. Yet how investors and corporations (i.e. economic enterprises) interact with their critics, such as NGOs, rural populations, social movements, journalists, and (activist) scholars, receives relatively little theoretical or empirical attention in anthropology and to a large extent also in the other social sciences. Notwithstanding that economic enterprises face more (international) pressure to minimise the negative impact of their practices than seems to be acknowledged, the outcomes of the interactions between them and their critics are highly ambiguous. To better explain this ambiguity the proposed project will focus on a large foreign investment in Zambia. The investment offers a perfect case study for a closer investigation of how economic enterprises balance economic and moral concerns, and whether, why, and how their practices change (or not) as a result of pressure they face. To better explain the limits and potentials of the interactions between economic enterprises and their critics the project combines two main objectives; one empirical, one theoretical:The first objective is to obtain an empirical understanding of how the foreign investor balances economic and moral/ethical concerns, in particular in reflection upon the pressure it faces from critics, both directly targeting the investor and within the global arena more generally. The investment offers a welcome case study for analysing how processes and outcomes result from interactions between different scales, i.e. the realities on the ground; logics at the funds headquarters, the role of other relevant actors abroad, such as NGOs, politicians, and development agencies; and global interactions between corporate actors and critics more generally. As such, the project aims to offer an integrated analysis incorporating both what happens on the ground and the global dimensions of a countermovement of critics. The second objective is to build a theoretical argument based upon insights gained through the lens of the empirical case study. Anthropologists have devoted substantial attention to concerns about (global) market society, yet how economic enterprises react to criticism has so far received relatively little attention in (economic) anthropology, notwithstanding the analytical tools Polanyis (2001) double movement offers and the attention his ideas continue to receive. Apart from contributing to theory development in (economic) anthropology, the intention is to also speak to debates in other disciplines, such as economics, development studies and geography.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria