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Linda Engström
Department of urban and rural development, SLU
Sida's Helpdesk for Environment and Climate Change
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How can an agricultural investment that never happened affect people living in poverty?
Published: 09 October 2020
The idea of promoting large-scale agricultural investment in order to achieve rural development in Africa has been strongly promoted by governments, bilateral and global development agencies since the early 2000’s. However, it is becoming widely recognized that many of these investments never materialize. So far, few studies have tried to understand this trend of failure.
Linda Engström, researcher at the Department of Urban and Rural Development at SLU, wrote her doctoral thesis in 2018 on large-scale agricultural investment as a development strategy for rural Tanzania. SLU Future Food has provided funding for a Development Dissertation Brief, which has been published by EBA, the Swedish Expert Group for Aid Studies.
- The main aim of my doctoral research was to contribute to the knowledge about how and why this new wave of large-scale agricultural investment so far has failed to deliver proposed outcomes, through studying a Swedish sugar-cane investment in Tanzania, says Linda Engström.
One of the most important findings of her research was that stalled or failed projects can have quite serious negative impacts on people living in poverty, not least pastoralists and smallholder farmers living on or using the land leased by the investor. The brief outlines how it is possible that something that never happened can have severe impacts. It makes the point that delayed, failed or cancelled development interventions need much more attention in development policy.
The brief also provides some policy messages on how development practitioners can work to avoid that such "non-materialized" projects harm people living in poverty.
Download the publication:
Linda Engström (2020), How can an Agricultural Investment that never Happened Affect People Living in Poverty?, EBA Dissertation Brief 2020:01, Januari 2020, Expertgruppen för biståndsanalys, Sverige.