Panel 132: Ownership versus Conditionality in Agricultural Policies in Subsaharan Africa

In principle, the aid effectiveness agenda stipulates that aid recipient countries should “own” national policies and programmes donors should align to these. In practice, donors are still very important not only in setting the agenda for public financial management, human rights and democratic ruling, but also in the way in which conditionalities are set for sector policies. This is legitimised in terms of “good economic and sector governance” against the observation that African governments often have very weak capacities to formulate and implement sector policies, but it is also highly problematic since it presumes donor knowledge of “best practises” which in reality is doubtful.

This panel takes up the issue of ownership versus conditionality for the area of agricultural policies. African governments are specially weak in organising this key sector for African development which is marked by many, often private actors with very different abilities and interests including food security and natural resources management; many interactions with other policy areas such as trade, industries or environment; difficult communications; many ideological debates; and a lack of clear evidence which agricultural policies really work under African conditions. The credibility of donors is particularly doubtful due to their own national agricultural and trade policies and weak track records of development interventions. Panel contributions take up issues such as lessons learned from previous agricultural policies and development interventions such as structural adjustment in Africa; the characteristics and roles of various players in agricultural policies such as the private sector and civil society; typical influencing factors such as ethnicity or segmentation of agriculture into sub-sectors; and the role of pan-African initiatives such as NEPAD to improve African ownership.