WENDY WOLFORD
From Pangaea to Partnership
The Many Fields of Rural Development
ABSTRACT Over the past decade, the rise of what has been called the Global Land Grab suggests the return of
rural development as a privileged (if problematic) site for accumulation, modernization, and growth. In this
paper, I analyze a set of rural development efforts in Mozambique, a country seen by many as the potential heart
of a new African food regime. I build a framework for understanding contemporary dynamics by drawing on the
triple metaphor of fields: first, I build on the sociological concept of field as strategic social space; second, I bring
together disparate disciplinary fields, including political economy, development, science and technology studies,
and agrarian studies; and third, I situate the paper on fields as cultivated ground, the literal arena in and on which
rural development takes place. The paper is narrated through four stories that illuminate the relationships and
dynamics within and across different “strategic action fields.” These stories highlight the role of knowledge and
power within distinct but related arenas of rural development and suggest the importance of seeing fields as in
contestation even when they are not necessarily in conversation. KEYWORDS Rural Development, Agrarian
Studies, Global Land Grab, Strategic Action Fields, Science, Mozambique, Brazil
Development—as an object of study, an aspiration, and an institutionally organized
enterprise—has been and is predicated on the transformation of rural life and livelihoods.
Situated historically and theoretically in colonial exploration, conquest, and extraction, and
enacted thereafter through enclosure, commodification, and factor reallocation, Development with a capital D (Hart :)—or the application of a body of theory and practice
to the transformation of national economies, polities, and societies—has meant the fundamental transformation of life on the land. Over the past decade, this transformation has
been led by what are referred to alternately as large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs;
Deininger and Byerlee ) or “land grabs” (Borras et al. ; Fairhead, Leach, and
Scoones ; White et al. ; Wolford et al. ). In a response to perceived scarcity,
investors as diverse as nation-states, agribusiness corporations, and hedge funds exploit inequality in agricultural productivity by acquiring land characterized as suffering from what
the World Bank and others refer to as “high yield gaps” (Deininger and Byerlee ), where
the potential to produce yields is as yet unmatched by the productive capacity of local
farmers.
In this paper, I attempt to analyze land grabbing by focusing on the knowledge necessary to make such deals possible. I do this by working with the triple metaphor of
fields: I build on ongoing work around the sociological concept of field as strategic social
space (see Fligstein and McAdam ); I integrate disparate academic fields in order to
undiscipline my approach, including political economy, development, science and
Sociology of Development, Vol. , Number , pps. –. electronic ISSN -X. ©  by the Regents of the
University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article
content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.
com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: ./sod.....
2
technology studies, and agrarian studies; and I situate the paper on fields as cultivated
ground, the literal arena in and on which rural development takes place. The paper is narrated through four stories that highlight a set of rural development efforts in Mozambique, a
country seen by many as the potential heart of a new African food regime. In the remainder
of this introduction, I elaborate on my use of the three meanings of a field, focusing particularly on the concept of “strategic action fields,” and outline the stories I will tell in the
following sections.
The notion of fields has been used widely and has received attention recently in Neil
Fligstein and Doug McAdam’s () expansive attempt to construct a general theory of
social interaction through what they call “strategic action fields.” The concept of fields as
constituted through the interplay of actors and structures within a given social space originates with Pierre Bourdieu’s () well-known work. Fligstein and McAdam (, )
build on Bourdieu by bringing the concept of fields together with insights from other literatures, including institutional theories, where institutions are everything from government
agencies to the “rules of the game” (North ), and social movement theories that take
as their premise the existence of contestation and unequal power relations. In this way,
Fligstein and McAdam’s () definition of a strategic action field as a “meso-level social
order” in which actors operate under “common understandings about the purposes of the
field” (p. ), though with very different interests, capacities, and social positions, addresses
both the critique that institutional theories see change as occurring through a theoretically
weak version of path dependence and thereby ignore power and the critique that social
movement theorists overpredict the existence of exploitation and resistance while problematically privileging both structure and agency. In Fligstein and McAdam’s work, the concept
of strategic action fields serves to delineate arenas of collective social interaction in which
people develop a set of interpretive frames that allow them to understand the norms or ideals
structuring any given field. Individuals and groups have differential abilities to shape and
contest those rules, but on some level there is a shared understanding of what the rules are.
This broadening of field theory is a useful way of incorporating social organization, institutions, and contestation, but to understand how fields are produced and reproduced over
time we need to more firmly situate fields in political economy: fields are produced through
(and structured by) social relations and forces of production and are sustained through the
cultural logics of reproduction (Thompson ). In this way, actors within fields can be understood as having their own moral economy (Thompson ; Wolford ), as well as
their own ways of knowing the world, their own imaginaries and imagined communities
(Wolford ) around which everyday life is structured. In the case of rural development,
these knowledges or imaginaries produce and legitimate particular relationships with the land
and the labors on it (Carse ; Lu, Valdivia, and Wolford ; Kull ; Robbins ).
One of the advantages of analyzing relationships through the concept of fields is that doing so allows us to think about relations within and between multiple fields. Fligstein and
McAdam (, ) refer to this as the “broader field environment” and characterize relations across fields as relatively distant or proximate, vertically or horizontally related, and
state or nonstate. In the case of rural development, the conceptualization of multiple fields
within a broader field environment is particularly useful for illuminating the ways in which
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3
ideas, practices, and knowledges flow through seemingly unrelated actors and places.
Individual projects may be located in specific places such as rural Mozambique, but they
are shaped by dynamics across multiple fields, from conferences on global climate
change to development projects in Peru, laboratories in Brazil, and sociology lectures in
Ithaca, New York.
In addition to using the concept of fields to emphasize the importance of relationships
that appear to be unconnected, I use the term as a metaphor to highlight the different
theoretical fields that are of use in developing a richer understanding of the production and
reproduction of strategic action fields. I do not develop a new approach or theory; rather,
I incorporate theoretical tools from political and cultural economy, through which I maintain an allegiance to historical materialism as a key explanation for social change; science and
technology studies, from which I borrow a focus on the constitution and production of
knowledge; development studies that provide the historical and empirical material for understanding efforts “to improve” while complicating notions of progress as linear or universal; and agrarian studies that emphasize the importance of giving the peasantry its proper
due as the fodder (and foil) for industrial modernization worldwide. Together, these conceptual fields provide the tools for understanding rural development as the environment in
which actors within and across multiple fields produce and reproduce their individual and
collective experiences.
I ground this necessarily baroque conceptual apparatus on the green and brown fields of
northern Mozambique. These small fields, planted mostly with subsistence crops such as
manioc, beans, groundnuts, and grains like sorghum or maize (corn), constitute the ground
on which rural development is founded and experienced. As cultivated spaces of social and
ecological life, agricultural fields tell a story all their own: stories of territorial expansion
and settlement; of sovereignty and the quest for national legitimacy; of fertility and yield,
and identity, tradition, and livelihood as well as inheritance and the future. Fields are
socio-natural constructions shaping and shaped by the social organization of life on the land.
The search for answers to “new” crises of development—from food insecurity to resource
scarcity or environmental degradation and change—turns on particular and often competing understandings of the role these fields can and should play. For actors in different strategic communities, the subsistence fields of rural Mozambique mean different things; for
some, they are an underutilized, empty expanse waiting for the appropriate technology and
investment, while for others they are productive, if nutrient-deficient, repositories of family
labor, knowledge, and suffering.
The triple metaphor of fields comes together in the material I use for this article. The
cases I present come from two different (but related!) projects in northern Mozambique:
one is an ambitious, multilateral development project funded by Brazil, Mozambique, and
Japan and modeled on an earlier multilateral experience in the grasslands of Brazil, and the
other is an NGO-led development project intended to help local residents reduce marine
and forest extraction by increasing the productivity of small-scale production.1 From these
two projects, I narrate four stories that describe interactions and relationships within different fields of action.2 I focus particularly on the role of knowledge in building and shaping
the fields.
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SOCIOLOGY OF DEVELOPMENT
SUMMER 2015
The first story is of new demands for South-South development and the rise of Brazil
as an “agent of change” in sub-Saharan Africa. The Brazilian agricultural development
project ProSAVANA in Mozambique is premised on the capacity of Western science
to organize agricultural production efficiently and address global food security concerns.
Agricultural science is the accepted language of this field, and I explore the implications
of this particular knowledge form for the organization of production. The second story
examines the push for “land governance” as a growing business in the developing world,
particularly sub-Saharan Africa (Carmody ), and argues that here economics and
business management are privileged ways of knowing. In the field of market-led development, consultants use expert models to help formalize land rights in the hopes that
transforming fields into commodities will incentivize investment, production, and the
expansion of markets. The third story focuses on political authority and argues that the
postcolonial Mozambican state has invested significant energy in knowing how to rule
in a context where the rules all come from somewhere else. The difference between governing and knowing the rules or knowing how to rule becomes very clear as party elites
go through the motions of providing resources and services to an impoverished population. The fourth and final story is of rural communities in northern Mozambique who
engage in development projects of various sorts, never knowing what the future will
bring. In this story, what local residents know is how to survive (even if their knowledge
isn’t always enough). They participate in the new Farmer Field Schools less because they
want the particular technologies offered than because they know that participation may
radically improve their chances of survival.
All four stories highlight different forms of knowledge: knowledge of/as science, business,
rule, and survival. The stories are admittedly partial and located within particular histories
and contexts, but they demonstrate how actors understand and navigate the “rules of the
game” in each field. Read together, they illuminate the broader field environment of rural
development more generally; although the two projects and four stories do not immediately
appear related, I argue that each is necessary for understanding the others. The assertions
and actions of one shape the “conditions of possibility” in the other three, even if the actors
themselves never meet; if we are to understand how LSLAs come to be seen as a logical response to hunger and scarcity, then we need to understand the different ways in which the
fields of rural Mozambique are known.
SOUTH-SOUTH DEVELOPMENT AND THE POLITICS OF PARTNERSHIP
The first story is, in many ways, a fantasy. It was cooked up in government offices and on
drafting tables that stretched from the central grasslands of Brazil to the northern region of
Mozambique. It is a fantastical reading of history that says much about the “unconscious
dreams of nations” (Rose :), as scientific experts are tasked with the responsibility of
mapping “order and progress” (as it says on the Brazilian national flag). This fantasy is officially
called ProSAVANA, though it has also been called the “largest farmland grab in Africa.”3
ProSAVANA is a -year program begun in , funded primarily by the Brazilian Cooperation Agency (ABC) with assistance from the Japanese International Cooperation Agency
(JICA). It is located in the Nacala Corridor, or what USAID () calls the “vast, untapped
Wolford | From Pangaea to Partnership
5
agricultural potential” (p. ) of northern Mozambique, characterized by perhaps the highest
“high yield gap” in the world.
ProSAVANA is intended to feed the world. The program is coordinated by the darling
of the global agricultural research community, the Brazilian agency Embrapa. It is Brazil
“paying its agricultural success forward” because “what Embrapa sows, the world reaps”
(Embrapa n.d.). Officially, the logic behind Brazil’s South-South assistance to Mozambican
agriculture turns on the notion of similarity—or what the Brazilians call “parallels” (Embrapa
; Wolford and Nehring forthcoming). The concept of parallels is a legacy of Cartesian
logic in which countries that share latitudinal space are categorized together—the tropics, the
subtropics, the temperate regions, etc. The Brazilians invoke parallels because the region of
that country’s greatest agricultural success (the cerrado grasslands of the Center West) sits at
roughly the same latitude as the northern part of Mozambique. The World Bank, without
any apparent irony, goes even further, tracing the similarity between Brazil and Mozambique
back to Pangaea—roughly  to  million years ago—when “Brazil and African landmasses were connected” (World Bank :). Now the two countries are thought to share
ecological characteristics such as their warm weather and acidic soils, and the World Bank has
declared: “Brazilian technology is easily adaptable to those parts of Africa that share similar
geological and climatic conditions.”4
Parallels between Brazil and Mozambique frame the invocation of South-South development, a new approach to development between developing countries, predicated on similarity and solidarity rather than on inequality and difference, as in former colonial relations.
Unlike Hobson ([] ), who cautioned the British to avoid colonizing in Africa because the natives were so regrettably foreign, and Lugard (), who emphasized the contrast
between the “communal life of the primitive tribe” and modern Europe, the new approach to
African development is based on a partnership between emerging economies—the BRICS
(Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and developing nations (Scoones, Cabral,
and Tugendhat ). The World Bank calls this a “pendulum swinging from North to
South” (World Bank :). The Brazilian development office argues that it offers an alternative to Official Development Aid (ODA) by not officially imposing conditions or obligations and by respecting the rhetoric, values, and sovereignty of its counterparts (ABC ).
Brazil’s development approach is “demand driven” and noninterventionist (Cabral and
Shankland ), based on bringing the “Brazilian miracle” of rapid growth, particularly agricultural growth, to Africa (Economist ). The rise of South-South development evokes
an older history of solidarity between “nonaligned” or former colonial nations even as it
deemphasizes obvious differences between a handful of emerging economies and the developing world as a whole.
One of the lead scientists for ProSAVANA is a soil microbiologist. When we spoke in July
, he was  months into a two-year contract. He was frustrated by the lack of management
skills he found among Mozambican farmers, which he attributed to laziness or satisfaction
with subsistence, but he was optimistic that he could convince farmers to plant his miracle
crop—soybeans. Thus far, people had been reluctant; most farmers in the region are focused
on subsistence as a primary goal, and soybeans are not a common food crop, but that didn’t
deter him: “They don’t know the potential of soy,” he said. “But they should!” He went on
6
SOCIOLOGY OF DEVELOPMENT
SUMMER 2015
poetically about the advantages of the leguminous plant: “Soya fixes nitrogen and produces
oil and meal for people and that improves their livelihoods, and then if people start eating
more meat [as it is assumed they will do if their livelihoods improve] they will need feed!”
He ended with a triumphant “Soy is nutritious and really needed!”
Soybeans, as well as other crops Embrapa is introducing to Mozambique, are free and
open sourced. At first that may seem confusing, because many observers have argued that
ProSAVANA will breed dependence on purchased seeds,5 but it was clear from our discussion and from published materials by Embrapa that the struggle in this strategic action field
is to determine much more broadly how agricultural production should be organized. And
in this the dominant model is mechanized, large-scale industrial agriculture. As the microbiologist cited above said, “We don’t want to sell seeds, we want to sell tractors.” Scientific
expertise, represented by the soil microbiologist, is necessary to legitimate the size and scope
of ProSAVANA and to transform unproductive subsistence fields into high-yielding
ground for commodity crops.
Scientific understandings of plant breeding, soil quality, and land management developed in the global North, particularly the United States, were disseminated to Brazil
through trilateral development projects in the s, adapted to the Brazilian savanna,
and are now being transferred to Mozambique. Thus ProSAVANA must be situated
within the postcolonial field of international “techno-politics” (Mitchell ; Tilley
), where Western science and technological innovations have been deployed for
political purposes, whether knowingly or not (Adas ; Headrick ; Hecht ).
ProSAVANA experts join the extensive networks of experts building new land-people
systems through industrial agriculture (Gupta ; Latham ; Perkins , ;
Staatz and Eicher ), large dams (Biggs ; Pritchard ; Teisch ), transportation infrastructure (Li ), veterinary medicine (Davis ), and modern pharmaceuticals (Anderson ) as well as markets for land (Walker ) and water (Goldman
). Even with the best of intentions, the presumed superiority of modern science has
facilitated plans for agriculture that bend labor and capital to the promise of the machine
(Fitzgerald ), expanding the logic of industry internally and internationally with its
unique sense of time, skill, and value. Such technologies are increasingly infused with benevolent assertions of participatory development (Medeiros ) and the protection of local
communities (Hayden a, b), but the notion of expertise continues to be defined
by formal training, adherence to scientific principles, and elite pedigree. Today, Brazilian
science is building on postcolonial networks of influence, access, and solidarity to promote
the creation of agro-industrial landscapes such as the Nacala Growth Corridor, a wide swath
of land in which ProSAVANA will provide the means for agricultural intensification and
modernization.
These new technologies are not simply physical or mechanical innovations. They represent the particular and partial belief system of this strategic action field, fantasies rooted in
the epistemological assumption that farming and farming systems adhere to certain universal
principles (see Fitzgerald ; Tilley ) so that relatively undifferentiated technological
interventions can be applied across time and space. From Henry Ford’s visions of orderly
industrial rubber plantations in the Amazon (Grandin ) to agricultural collectives in the
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Soviet Union (Scott ), scientific imaginaries have validated technological interventions
that rearrange livelihoods and environments in the process (Latour ).
These imaginaries or fantasies serve to legitimate and shape Brazilian intervention in
Mozambique, rendering the partnership “natural” so that expertise and technologies can be
“easily transferred” as long as scientific rules and methods are followed. Yet it is clear that
while fantasies of universality, scientific reasoning, and partnership have material implications
on the ground in the form of tractors, laboratories, and experts, the construction and diffusion of such fantastical reasoning are always contested. Mobilization against ProSAVANA
has garnered significant national and international attention. According to the microbiologist quoted earlier, hopes (which he still maintained) that Brazilian farmers would migrate
to Mozambique and apply their knowledge of large-scale commodity farming in situ have
been scaled back in the wake of civil society protests. Activists argue that ProSAVANA may
sound like a dream come true but is predicated on inequality (high yield gaps) and poverty,
neither of which the program seems likely to address (UNAC ). From the high yield gap
predicated on unequal access to technology and different traditions of cultivation, to new
markets for soybeans and tractors and the rhetoric of southern Africa as the new continental
breadbasket, the blossoming field of South-South development is a contested one but is
currently dominated by a belief in the surpluses that science can yield.
KNOWING THE TRUE VALUE OF LAND
The second story is less of a fantasy and more of a mystery. This story begins in the United
States in the early s, a time when the country was unmoored by simultaneous threats of
terrorism and global economic crisis. Under George W. Bush and the weight of impatient
fearfulness, the U.S. Congress felt obligated (and empowered) to question the rationale behind aid to developing countries (Saith ). A new agency, the Millennium Challenge
Corporation, was created that would “advance American values and interests” by aggressively
pushing aid recipients to institute good governance (accountability, transparence) and economic freedom (free markets) (MCC n.d.-a). In , Congress approved the formation of
the MCC, with the specific goal of providing loans to competitively selected recipients, structured around rigorously designed and continuously evaluated projects that were preidentified
as ensuring a high economic rate of return (EROR). The MCC institutes a formal process
before providing funding and intervenes at regular points thereafter to assess progress made
and to potentially delay or cut off funding.
The MCC and the government of Mozambique signed a “compact” (as the MCC’s
agreements are called) in  focused on four projects in four northern states, including water and sanitation (funded at approximate US$ million over five years), roads
(US$ million), agriculture (particularly coconut sales, US$ million) and land administration (US$ million). The goal of the land administration project was to help “beneficiaries meet their immediate needs for registered land rights and better access to land for
investment.” In other words, the project was to assist local residents in registering their land
use claims, creating a tenure system in which access and ownership would be clear, excludable, and exchangeable.6 The economic rationale for this project was fourfold. Improving
land tenure administration and security would provide economic benefits in the form of
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SOCIOLOGY OF DEVELOPMENT
SUMMER 2015
“(i) Income to communities with communal land that are to be delineated and ‘titled’
under the Land Fund and will lease out a fraction of their land to commercial investors;
(ii) Income to urban parcel-holders who will receive government approved land use transfer
rights under the program; (iii) Transaction cost savings to small rural landholders (on noncommunal lands) who will access land titling services according to their demand; and
(iv) Transaction cost savings to large commercial investors who currently pay substantial
costs in time and legal fees to access land in Mozambique” (MCC n.d.-b).
The project of providing clear title is not unique to Mozambique; rather, it represents a
“dream of universal fixity” (Craib :) that appeals to the modern state and the market
alike. But concerns about land tenure security in Mozambique must be situated in the country’s particular history of colonial rule and independence (O’Laughlin ). In Mozambique,
all land became state land with independence in .7 The new socialist government under
the Mozambican Liberation Front (Frelimo, Frente Liberação de Moçambique) created collective farms and encouraged rural-to-urban migration (a policy euphemistically referred to as
“villagization”; see Mahoney :–) but never succeeded in reducing the diversity of
agrarian classes (Bowen ; O’Laughlin ). Collective farms were largely dismantled in
the s as part of a brutal civil war, and land tenure issues were one of the most pressing
questions as the country ended hostilities in  (Tanner ). The Land Policy of  and
Land Law of  strengthened the rights of customary users and systems (traditional management systems, either communities or individuals; see Norfolk and Tanner ), but the
state oversees all land transactions, whether for community use rights or foreign investors.
Mozambique is still largely an agrarian society, with approximately  percent of its population in agriculture, but the countryside consists of a variety of rural producers, most of whom
farm on fields under five hectares.
In this context, the MCC’s investment in land administration was somewhat mysterious.
If all land in the country was legally owned by the state and the state was already empowered
to transact leases on unoccupied land of up to  years, renewable for another , how could
land administration be profitable or generate a high economic rate of return? It was clear that
tenure security could have many collateral benefits for individuals and communities, but land
would still not be freely exchanged or divisible, so how would higher returns be realized? In
other words, without a market for land, how was this profit to be made and to whom would
it accrue? I asked this question to the head of the MCC program in Mozambique in March
. We sat in his high-rise office in the port of Maputo, six floors up from the intense press
of people and cars on the street below. I had had to go through the ominous-looking security
on the first floor, sliding in on short notice with an introduction from a USAID program
officer even though visitors were supposed to be cleared  hours in advance.
The silence of the office, and its immaculate furnishings and wall-to-wall carpeting,
seemed odd after the constant noise and grit of the street below. My interviewee explained
how the MCC determined which projects it would take on and how this process led the
agency to fund land administration in Mozambique. I interrupted him not long into our
conversation to ask how land certification and overall land governance could possibly generate high returns when there was no legal or official land market in Mozambique. He answered, with a polite smile, that it was true there were no sanctioned land markets but that
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the model could accommodate a variable for an “informal land market.” When one made
the assumption (in the model) that landholders would be able to lease their land to others
and profit from doing so, then certification generated incentives for exchange and high
returns (in the model). Officially recognized certificates would allow outside investors sufficient confidence to do business, both with the certificate holders and with the representatives of communities or districts, who could now assure such investors that they did
indeed control the land (Tanner ). Given that in accordance with the  Land Law
investors could already negotiate leases with government officials for unoccupied land, the
real difference expected as a result of the MCC’s program (and model) was that smallholders would be able to transfer the rights to land they were currently using.
This way of viewing, allocating, and exchanging land through the lens of business and
economics sits uncomfortably with the recounting of land use and authority in the stories
of local community members. Many people have written about the multiple, overlapping
traditional, customary, and bureaucratic authorities in rural Mozambique who have some
influence or recognized right to allocate land use rights (Fairbairn ; O’Laughlin ;
Tanner ). In our research we came across three different systems for adjudicating access
to land (or controlling it; see Peluso and Lund ), all of which were mediated by a variety
of factors including market access, capital and labor resources, political affiliations, authority
(Lund and Boone ) and social identity (Fairbairn ). In an agricultural system that
had long relied on swidden (slash-and-burn) methods of regularly clearing new land, some
people said they had consulted the local community to locate land that was currently fallow
and not too close to any other fields. Others said that they had consulted with the local king
and asked for permission to plant. Kings are traditional authorities in rural Mozambique
and are particularly relevant today in the northern part of the country. When the socialist
party, Frelimo (Mozambique Liberation Front), won political control after Independence,
Frelimo officials attempted to replace the kingdoms (regulados) and chiefly power with a
third way of managing claims to land—through bureaucratic positions at the district level.
Every community we met with had these bureaucratic managers, referred to as secretaries, but in the northern part of the country where both ProSAVANA and the MCC are
working the opposition party Renamo (Mozambique National Resistance) has considerable influence, and Renamo has historically been more supportive of the regulado system (Dinerman ). As a result of the ongoing struggles between local communities
and political parties, different systems of land administration and authority overlap one
another in rural areas, making it difficult to know how to access land securely (R. Hall
and Paradza ).
In our research with rural communities in the coastal areas of the northern state of
Nampula, we encountered all three systems of authority. In one community where we
worked, the king approached us after we had been interviewing in the area for several
days. He was unassuming and even diffident, although one of our team members, a local
extension agent, argued that we should have contacted him before beginning our interviews, given that the king had traditional jurisdiction over land and political affairs in
the community. There was some confusion and disagreement over how relevant the
king still was, but we arranged an interview.
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I arrived at the king’s compound the next day. It was relatively spacious, with two wellbuilt houses, one cob and the other adobe, and a smaller separate building that appeared to
be for storage. Neat fields of corn and sugarcane, intercropped with pigeon pea and beans,
surrounded the house, and the courtyard was swept clean. The translator working with me
and I sat on a mat with the king; his two wives and three children sat on a mat laid out ten
feet behind him. He explained to us in a very matter-of-fact tone that he had authority over
land use in the entire region. People who wished to break ground for planting were required
by traditional rule to seek his permission.
The king’s soft-spoken words in the courtyard that day reminded me of the hush in the
MCC office, hundreds of miles away. In the end, though, land in a model in Maputo is
largely incommensurable (Kuhn ) with land in a kingdom in rural Nampula, even if
they often look alike on the ground. Overlapping and often contradictory visions of what
land is and how land should be accessed, used, or exchanged animate the two. In the context
of the contemporary field of power that is rural development in Mozambique, these are contradictory—though not always competing—forms of knowledge within one strategic action
field (see also Bowen ; Galli ). Who will win the struggle for authority over land
rights will depend on who is able to marshal the resources (what Bourdieu refers to as capitals) to defend what they know. While the MCC has the power to rally considerable support for its form of knowledge—business—as applied to land, other ways of knowing work
to gain the upper hand or to undermine official land-titling projects. This struggle is much
more than symbolic; the land itself—the fertility of its soil, the products produced, the livelihoods cultivated—will be fundamentally shaped by who gets to set the rules that govern
access to the land.
PARTY POLITICS: KNOWING HOW TO RULE
The third story is short; it is almost, and quite appropriately, an interlude. This story is
about the Mozambican government after Independence, but it speaks to issues within
development more broadly, given the emphasis in the field on “good governance” or
“good enough governance” (Grindle ) as the solution to everything from fiscal crisis
to geopolitical conflict and even poverty (Dill ; Saith ). The optimistic World
Bank report titled Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa (), otherwise
known as the Berg Report, was influential in tying good governance to open markets,
efficiency, progress, and democracy.
Today, Mozambique is a “one-party-dominant” state, with the socialist party Frelimo at
the helm since  (Sahn and Sarris ). The country is considered a success story after
having experienced  percent rates of growth per year for over a decade (Calderisi ).
This success has allowed Mozambique to reduce its reliance on foreign aid for its operating
budget from  percent in  to  percent in  (ActionAid ). By most accounts,
this is still extreme reliance on foreign aid for the everyday operations of government; that it
is considered a success is indication of how bad things are in the poorest countries in the
world (Wuyts ). More importantly, this so-called success has reduced neither relative
nor absolute poverty, and Mozambique continues to be one of the poorest countries in the
world, with roughly  percent of its population living below the line of absolute poverty.
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11
Successful “growth without development” (Amin ) is possible because the Mozambican
government has enabled the rapid extraction of its natural resources—coal, natural gas,
minerals, precious gems, and land—and it has put the profits of this extraction into the business of ruling (Sumich ).8 This is one of the things the government knows how to do
well in Mozambique: how to rule in the context of what Harrison () calls “extroversion,”
or the outward-facing nature of the state. Within the strategic action field that is extroverted
governance in Mozambique, the government has to know how to rule, even when support is
tenuous and everyday living conditions for the majority of the population are very precarious.
Ruling, in this field and under these circumstances, means knowing the rules of the game and
knowing how to play: how to seem like a democracy, when you’re really a one-party authoritarian state; how to sell land but insist that you’re not actually selling it, that leases don’t
count; how to pretend you are coordinating agricultural development and running an extension agency when you are not.
This last comment requires further explanation. In July , my group of colleagues and
I had a meeting with the district director of the Ministry of Agriculture in Nampula state,
where ProSAVANA sits. We were nervous, as we had been told this was a rare meeting.
We set up our PowerPoint presentation and waited at the front of a set of tables arranged
in a long rectangle. After  or  minutes of waiting, the director’s retinue came in. They
filed into the seats on one side of the rectangle and took out their papers and notebooks.
Together, we waited awkwardly for another  minutes or so until the director himself
swept in, nodding to people in the room and walking briskly to the front with a smile.
What followed next was performative and ritualistic in the way that good governance often
is, especially when governance itself has become a field of struggle (Larson and Aminzade
). The director greeted us formally, commenting briefly on the slaves that our country
(the United States) had taken from Africa not overly long ago. With that opening,
I stumbled awkwardly into our PowerPoint presentation with the results of our research.
After the presentation was over and had gone reasonably well, I made my way over to the
director. I told him that manioc rot (cassava brown streak disease, CBSD) was very bad
in many of the communities we had visited and that they would all really love to have the
new varieties of disease-resistant manioc that the ministry had developed. We had heard
so many complaints about the rot during our fieldwork in local communities, I felt I had
to tell the director in case there were manioc stalks he could distribute.
The director listened attentively and then snapped his fingers and called for one of the people from his group. “Hey,” he said, “don’t we have a truck full of that rot-resistant manioc?”
The person he had spoken to was the head of research in the state office of the national extension agency, and he nodded, even though he looked visibly confused. The director continued: “Well, see that you take the truck and go to the coast where the professor has been, and
get the stalks out to those people.” The extension agent nodded again, and the director nodded at me, and I was so pleased—until later, when I told my colleague from CARE what had
happened and he laughed. He seemed genuinely surprised that I was upset. “No,” he said,
“there is no truck, and even if there were, it wouldn’t have manioc in it.”
This story illustrates what the government knows. There are many dedicated people in
government offices who know a great deal, but taken as a whole what the government
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knows is how to rule. Local actors such as the regional director of the Ministry of Agriculture operate strategically in their given field of action, in which knowing how to rule means
knowing how to pretend to coordinate agricultural development and run an extension
agency when in fact you rely on external organizations to do much of the work. Other ways
of knowing how to govern are offered up by civil society, international NGOs, and development agencies (Dinerman ), but the history of colonialism and postcolonial struggles
for leadership makes it difficult to effect substantive change (Harrison ; Sumich ).
RURAL DEVELOPMENT AND LOCAL COMMUNITIES: KNOWING HOW TO SURVIVE
My final story takes place along the coast of Nampula, in northern Mozambique. A group of
Cornell researchers, interpreters, and extension agents worked in several different communities during the summer of , conducting interviews to understand the reasons for participation and nonparticipation in the Farmer Field Schools (FFS) started by two
international NGOs, CARE and WWF (see Hickey, Young, and Wolford ). The FFS
program in Nampula was modeled after FFS programs implemented in other areas of the
world and was intended to introduce the principles of conservation agriculture through
farmer-led experimentation and participation.
As suggested in the preceding story, NGOs like CARE and WWF operate in an important field of action where they provide many of the everyday elements of governance (service
delivery, capacity building, protection for human rights) without the official mandate of a
government. They are a constant presence in Mozambique, as they are in much of the developing world. They bring their own sort of knowledge, one that demonstrates long dedication to the principles of development, assistance, and self-help. This knowledge is built up
by reams of paperwork (now regularly summarized in pithy streams of  characters) produced by armies of workers who circulate among NGOs around the world through the offices of CARE, Oxfam, Action Aid, Catholic Relief Services, and so on. NGO workers
spend time “in the field” working on particular projects and then in capital city offices, overseeing finances, attending countless meetings and developing new frameworks, approaches,
and strategies—from sustainable livelihoods to capacity building to resilience—for understanding development (see Mosse ). They are world-weary, having seen too much, yet
at the same time they are perpetually optimistic.
They are also, in Mozambique’s case, totally essential to the everyday functioning of the
country from the national level to the local (Schraeder ), especially in the rural areas of
northern Mozambique, where the government is visibly absent. To be visibly absent means
that while the state sets national policies regarding agriculture and rural development it is
not providing many of the most basic, taken-for-granted responsibilities of a democratic
state (Rosario ); its absence is hard to miss. Although government officials usually occupy the grandest or most ostentatious buildings in any town, dependency on aid and NGO
labor has led to a “degree of surrogacy and substitution of the government’s role” (Thomas
:). When we noted during an interview with a government official that interventions
into farming would be more effective if they were supported by functioning schools, a local
health system, markets, and infrastructure such as roads and potable water, he said: “But
[that is not what governments do], that’s what NGOs do.”
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13
The visible absence of the government in everyday affairs does not mean that the government is very far from people’s minds. To the contrary, people in rural communities have
experienced dramatic political changes since the s. In the areas where we worked, people narrated their collective history in terms of their relationship with the government. In
one community, for example, the people we interviewed recounted their history in four generations or periods.9 The first was the precolonial time, which community members labeled
simply “the first period,” when people fished and planted in traditional groups. The second
period was the time of colonial rule, when many people were taken from the community to
work in the sisal and sugarcane plantations or on the road that now passes by the center of
the small village. This was the time of the regulos (kings); people had small fields of their
own but were forced to work collectively by king and colonial power alike. They lived in
straw houses that “weren’t worth anything” and planted cotton, peanuts, corn, and rice.
They couldn’t have any goods and were not allowed to marry “a pretty woman.” The third
period was what community members called the time of “the government,” when the
Mozambican Liberation Front fought and won the war for independence, during which
many people died. When Frelimo emerged victorious, the party instituted many controls on
local districts, and the civil war began. The civil war between Frelimo and Renamo was bitterly contested in the northern parts of the country, which were considered areas of strong
Renamo support. In , the civil war formally ended when the two groups agreed to a
peace deal, and this was the beginning of what our interviewees called the time of democracy
and desenvolvimento (development). The population in the villages began to grow as people
left the factories or came to the rural areas to marry or to look for work.
The simultaneous presence and absence of the government in rural northern Mozambique
has created a highly uncertain field of action. Local knowledge in this region was shaped by a
long colonial history; people we talked to had worked in the plantations and factories under
Portuguese rule and then had participated in—or been affected by—a brutal war for independence and an even more brutal civil war. People we talked to said that during this long period
of war they had hidden in the bushes or the forest or the mangroves, waiting until it was safe
to come out again. People had been conscripted into the military or forced labor; the ones
who had remained near home scratched a living out of the earth while their homes were
burnt to the ground. The knowledge they developed, in many ways, was the knowledge
of survival. In the strategic action field of rural communities in northern Mozambique,
people survived by strategically diversifying their risk. And one of the key ways to diversify risk in a government-poor, NGO-rich environment is to take advantage of whatever
projects outsiders offer.
In our work conducting interviews in these rural communities, we were surprised by
the number of people who participated in the Farmer Field Schools organized by CARE
and WWF and who seemingly needed very little convincing to abandon their old practices and adopt new ones. I think we had all expected that there would be some tension
between traditional forms of knowledge and the new practices of conservation agriculture. Over time, however, we realized that what would normally be considered “traditional” knowledge forms had been violently disrupted by colonial rule and later by
civil war. The new knowledge that people had developed over time was the knowledge
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of survival, and survival under these circumstances meant that when outside people—
particularly white people—came in with a new project, local residents were inclined to
say yes because they wanted to learn how to farm more effectively and they knew that
participating in the project might mean the difference between dirty water and clean
water, between malaria and a fighting chance, between life and death. As one man said
simply, “I want to learn anything people bring.”
This knowledge of survival is not an easy one; it seems to be defined by suffering. At the
end of almost every interview conducted by our team, we asked whether people had anything else to tell us, anything we had missed or forgotten to ask. And people, from young
women to old men, would sit up straight and say, “Yes, there is one thing you should know;
we are suffering.” There was a dignity to their statement; it wasn’t a complaint, more an insistence that we should know the truth and not leave with something less than the full
weight of their experiences. This suffering is perhaps the underside of the knowledge of
survival; it is the banal and sobering expression of the subsistence ethic (Scott ) under
duress, learned at the margins or limits of human existence and conveyed to anyone who
might be able to help.10 Understanding knowledge and the ways in which knowledges interact with the strategic actions fields that encompass these cultivated fields in northern
Mozambique requires understanding the production and manifestation of this suffering.
CONCLUSION: KNOWLEDGE AND THE DISPENSATION OF FIELDS IN
RURAL DEVELOPMENT
By way of conclusion, I ask: How useful is the triple metaphor of fields for understanding
rural development in Mozambique? What is at stake in considering the way in which different forms of knowledge structure action in and across the four stories (or fields) I describe?
At stake, I suggest, is our very interpretation of what rural development is, for whom it functions, and with what effect.
Throughout the often-violent histories of colonialism and development, a clear disregard
for rural life has been evident. This disregard has been apparent in the widespread assumption that colonization, trade, and industry would promote civilization among scattered and
barbarous folk (Lugard ; Smith [] ); and it manifests in David Ricardo’s
([] ) condemnation of large landowners and his obsession with the unproductive
qualities of ground rent; in Sir Arthur Lewis’s () admiring invocation of primitive
accumulation; and in Walt Whitman Rostow’s () notion of “take-off” as predicated on
land reform and the urbanization of the campesino. Indeed, most of the major figures in the
discipline of sociology writ large—including Adam Smith, Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx,
Max Weber, Vladimir Lenin, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Polanyi, and Michel Foucault—were
grappling with this transformation, the direction of which (from rural to urban, primitive to
modern, mechanical to organic) was so often assumed that history was mistaken for theory,
and transformation was gradually deemed synonymous with transition (see World Bank
). Development actors today—including governments, financial institutions, and
philanthropic organizations—all provide incentives for developing countries to industrialize
and urbanize because they “know” that doing so is highly correlated with development,
tautology notwithstanding (Araghi ).
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After a brief period in the s and s when development efforts moved away
from the rural to focus more exclusively on urban development, informal labor and the
growth of slums, global manufacturing networks, and fiscal adjustment (Barrett, Carter,
and Timmer ; Staatz and Eicher ), the question of rural transformations (or
what is sometimes referred to as the “agrarian question”) has reasserted itself with a vengeance.11 Due simultaneously to institutional intervention and neglect, multiple new
and ongoing crises seem to both threaten and reinvigorate rural development efforts.
The World Food Crisis of –, when international prices of key commodity crops
spiked sharply, threw an unprecedented number of people into a chronic state of food
insecurity, undoing high-profile advances made under the Millennium Development
Goals. At the same time, people, organizations, and agencies around the world increasingly came to see climate change as a threat, one expected to be particularly onerous for
those who rely most closely on natural resources for their livelihoods (Barrett ;
Bringezu et al. ). Woven throughout the declarations of crisis and concerns for the
future are clear Malthusian invocations of resource scarcity due to population growth,
or what is euphemistically referred to as the new “demographic transition,” where
changing consumption patterns in emerging economies such as China and India are
identified as key contributors to global land, water, and energy scarcity.
In response to these crises or concerns, there is renewed focus on agriculture and
rural development as both the problem and the solution. The Global Land Grab cited
already in this paper is one response. The rush to acquire land as a productive investment highlights the return of agriculture as a means to provide capital, labor, and commodities for economic growth. A second response to current concerns is the ambitious
agenda for rural development promoted by old and new institutional actors such as the
Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Sachs ). The
Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) is a multi-billion-dollar effort based
on the best available science and “commonsense” economics. It is intended to improve
smallholder viability in the poorest communities of sub-Saharan Africa by promoting
entrepreneurship, market access, good governance, and participatory technological diffusion (Scoones and Thompson ). This agenda mirrors that of a third response to
crises in contemporary development: the Millennium Development Goals signed by 
nation-states in  (and in operation from  to ). A set of eight laudable
goals, the MDGs identify development as the eradication of objective characteristics belonging to certain populations (poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, etc.; see Wolford )
and outline a set of principles that will best achieve eradication, including enhanced
capabilities, improved access to market opportunities, and good governance (Saith ).
These eight goals have shaped what and how people know about development, and their
reformulation into a new set of Sustainable Development Goals to be unveiled in 
promises to continue a heightened focus on rural development as both problem and
solution.
To fully grasp the transformative potential of such politics and practices, we need to analyze the construction and deployment of knowledge across multiple fields, from agricultural
science to property rights, governance, social organization, and livelihood. The academic
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SUMMER 2015
literature on rural development today is rich with material from individual case studies, but
we do not always see the connections between cases or between nonproximate actors or
events because events and actors are pulled together opportunistically to illuminate the
dynamics of the case at hand. This makes theoretical and empirical sense, as case studies are
useful windows onto a broader landscape; much like a camera obscura, case studies provide
specific points of entry that help one to see the broader context and conjuncture. At the same
time, a focus on specific cases without attention to the broader environment can literally
obscure one’s vision, causing one to miss the pregnant silences, emphatic rejections, polite
lack of interest, unintentional behaviors, and noncontestations that appear (by definition) to
have nothing theoretically or empirically valid to say to the case at hand (Lund ).
The four stories narrated in this paper illustrate different fields of action that are shaped
by different “rules of the game,” or different ways of knowing the land in Mozambique.
These different ways of knowing—perhaps best described as science, business, rule, and
survival—all interact on (and shape) the broader environment of rural development in
Mozambique and beyond. Relationships between wildly unequal actors within and across
these fields shape (and are shaped by) the sort of projects imaginable and thus shape the very
landscape in northern Mozambique. These relationships are replicated in unique ways
across the landscape of rural development, shaping the range of proposed solutions from the
Global Land Grab to the MDGs.
Ambitious development projects like ProSAVANA are legitimated and even made necessary by scientific imaginaries of the land, plant genetics, and disease ecology. From the point
of view of the “high yield gap,” in which land in different locations is rendered commensurable and measured against an ideal, northern Mozambique is the answer to global food insecurity, a potential breadbasket for southern Africa and Asia. The fact that ProSAVANA
will require large-scale, mechanized producers in a country dominated by poor smallholders
is a potential problem, but one that can be at least partially addressed if land is made fungible,
a commodity for investment by more efficient stakeholders. And so both the scientific imaginary of ProSAVANA and the business-oriented imaginary of the Millennium Development
Corporation are deemed necessary if Mozambique is to match the yields attained in the
world’s most productive lands.
Imagining such a project might be difficult if the government were forced to respond to
angry smallholders forced off their land. But the government of Mozambique knows how to
continue ruling in the absence of popular support, a viable budget, or a mandate. Thus in 
the minister of agriculture, José Pacheco, responded to angry protests against ProSAVANA by
assuring people that “in Mozambique there is no land for sale, the land is owned by the State”
(Macauhub ). The state, though, in its position as landowner, has set aside millions of
hectares of land to lease to outside investors. At the same time, rural residents focused on surviving from one day to the next are unlikely to challenge the scientists or development agents
or even government officials. Their form of knowledge—survival—is not a quiet or quiescent
one, but in the current moment it is subordinate. These different forms of knowledge operate
in a highly uneven field of power, and each struggles for recognition and position. Their struggle, in turn, defines the contours of what rural development in Mozambique is today, for
whom it functions, and with what effect.
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NOTES
This paper was first presented as a talk at the two-day workshop “Mapping the State of Play on the
Global Food Landscape,” organized by Jennifer Clapp, Annette Desmarais, and Matias Margulis and
held September –, , at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The paper retains
some of the exploratory and provocative nature of a talk, as it represents my preliminary attempt to
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work through the case of Brazilian agricultural investment and research in sub-Saharan Africa. The
workshop was extremely productive, and I thank all the participants, particularly the organizers. I also
thank several people for their comments on the paper, including the anonymous referee for this
journal, Amanda Hickey, Katherine Young, Lidia Cabral, Ryan Nehring, Marina Welker, Durba
Ghosh, Rachel Prentice, Maria Fernandes, TJ Hinrichs, Sara Pritchard, and the Institute for Social
Studies land team at Cornell. Research presented in this paper was supported by funding from the
National Science Foundation (grant SES-), the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future and
the Institute for Social Studies at Cornell University, and the CARE-WWF Alliance in Nampula.
All errors are mine.
. The findings in this paper result from preliminary research in Maputo, Mozambique, in March
 and one four-week team project conducted in coastal communities in  (described in the
fourth section of this paper). In , I interviewed fourteen people in fifteen positions, including
Brazilian agronomists and plant breeders, Brazilian program officers, the head of the US Millennium
Challenge Corporation, the head of Feed the Future USAID Mozambique, two CARE field workers
involved in land rights issues, the former head of the Ministry of Agriculture, a current officer in the
Ministry, and the head of the national extension agency. In , research was conducted by three
people from Cornell (Amanda Hickey, Katherine Young, and Wendy Wolford) as well as a team of
interpreters and extension agents (Benelito Adelino, Luisa Arlindo Balança, Jose Gigante, Damião
Mupijama, and Goncalvez Ali Cabral). We worked in three communities in the Angoche and Moma
districts, in the state of Nampula. Within these three communities, we interviewed participants and
nonparticipants in the CARE-WWF Farmer Field School program. Research methods included
participatory appraisals in five focus groups, semistructured interviews with approximately 
participants and nonparticipants in Farmer Field Schools, and participatory field and resource
mapping.
. Narrating rural development through stories places agricultural scientists, development agents,
government officials, and small farmers or local residents on an equal footing and counters the usual
preference for describing development at the national or international level through official-sounding
histories, statistics, and program brochures while narrating the experiences and perspectives of local
communities through “vignettes.” By insisting that all knowledge is partial and particular, and
emphasizing the multiple spaces in which knowledge is deployed, I intervene in the politics of
academic knowledge, arguing that official histories and statistics are stories of their own, negotiating
for preeminence on an uneven field of power.
. This quote is from the largest farmer organization in Mozambique (UNAC): “ProSAVANA can
be summed up in this simple equation: Mozambique supplies the land, Brazil does the farming, and
Japan takes the food. It is a vast project being coordinated by the governments of the three countries
that involves billions of dollars and millions of hectares of land. It may amount to the biggest
farmland grab in Africa.” See GRAIN ().
. This quote and sentiment appear in many places: for example, see World Bank ().
. See this statement signed by a group of social movements and NGOs soon after the ProSAVANA
Master Plan was released in March : Justiça Ambiental! et al. ().
. This notion of clear property rights is itself a sort of fantasy, one that tempts all governments,
particularly postcolonial governments attempting to unravel the complicated overlapping jurisdictions
sedimented into place by tradition, colonial rule and postcolonial ambitions.
. This is common in sub-Saharan Africa more generally, where over  percent of the land is in
state hands. In studies on recent LSLAs, it has become clear that investors can take advantage of legal
and institutional pluralism to engage in covert deal making and corruption in the acquisition and
leasing of land (Arezki, Deininger, and Selod ).
. Sumich () writes, “Instead of democratization opening new spaces for the nation’s citizens to
negotiate relationships of power with the state, the party has been able to use its newfound resources to
centralize negotiations within its own structures” (p. ).
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. This community history is an amalgamated regional history, pulled together from multiple interviews
as well as from the “history group” from the original focus group interviews conducted in each community.
Many of the focus group participants and interviewees had not lived in the community for long, just ten or
eleven years, so they provided memories of life on the land in the region more broadly.
. Thanks to Nitsan Chorev, who pointed out that protestations of suffering are not performed
only by people at the margins; many researchers and NGO workers have found similar dynamics in
more well-off communities.
. The agrarian question, usually traced back to German social democrat Karl Kautsky ([]
), originally examined the role of peasants and agriculture in the transition from feudalism to
capitalism or socialism (see Bernstein , ; D. Hall ; Li ; McMichael ).
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