Abstract
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.
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We now have a useful overview of investor strategy, when dealing with enclave ownership. Ryan (2018) recently studied 27 leases in seven chiefdoms in the north of Sierra Leone. Negotiations were conducted between investors and communities by parliamentarians and chiefs. Projects were couched in terms of general but vague promises that the activity of investors would bring development. Where leases were available for inspection, they were signed by only a minority of community representatives. Many family landowners only found out about the deal after projects had started. Land users lost access to important resources, such as local oil palm bush and areas of wetland vital for food security. Few, if any of these lease agreements, Ryan concludes, would pass the test of prior informed consent. None of these schemes seems institutionally sustainable because each one has involved brokerage that seeks to skate around enclave objections. The results obtained by Christensen et al. (2018) for Liberia suggest that many external investors are wise enough to avoid such murky deals where they can.
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Bulte, E., Richards, P., Voors, M. (2018). Agrarian Development in West Africa: Possibilities for Institutional Reform?. In: Institutions and Agrarian Development. Palgrave Studies in Agricultural Economics and Food Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98500-8_7
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