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

In much of Eastern Africa, the last decade has seen a renewedinterest in spatial development plans that link mineralexploitation, transport infrastructure and agriculturalcommercialisation. While these development corridors haveyielded complex results–even in cases where significantinvestments are yet to happen–much of the existing analysiscontinues 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‘hitthe ground’, with a specific interest to the diverse agriculturalcommercialisation pathways that they induce. Specifically, thearticle introduces and analyses four corridors–LAPSSET in Kenya,Beira and Nacala in Mozambique, and SAGCOT in Tanzania–which are generating‘demonstrationfields’, economies ofanticipation andfields of political contestations respectively, andas a result, creating–or promising to create–diverse pathwaysfor agricultural commercialisation, accumulation anddifferentiation. In sum, the article shows how top-down grand-modernist plans are shaped by local dynamics, in a process thatresults in the transformation of corridors, from exclusivist‘tunnel’visions, to more networked corridors embedded in localeconomies, and shaped by the realities of rural Eastern Africa.