Agriculture remains central to global debates on livelihoods, development, and sustainability, particularly across the Global South where it is widely promoted as a pathway to poverty reduction, food security, and economic transformation. Yet, despite decades of reform, agricultural development continues to generate uneven and contradictory outcomes. Policies framed around inclusion, rural transformation, and sustainability often reproduce inequality, marginalise smallholders, and erode ecological foundations. In this thesis, I argue that these outcomes are not primarily the result of isolated failures of policy design or implementation but arise from structural contradictions embedded in the internal logic of a dominant neoliberal-productivist paradigm that prioritises productivity, market integration, and private-sector-led growth. I examine Ghana’s agricultural development trajectory as an empirically rich case through which to interrogate these contradictions. Smallholder farmers produce the majority of Ghana’s food, yet remain constrained by insecure land access, uneven market relations, ecological vulnerability, and limited political voice. Grounded in critical realism, I employ immanent critique to evaluate agricultural policies against their own stated commitments, showing how internal tensions undermine their objectives. I use the Capability Approach (CA) as a normative and evaluative framework to assess the consequences of these contradictions in terms of farmers’ substantive freedoms rather than narrow indicators of productivity or income. Empirically, the analysis draws on a mixed-methods research design combining policy analysis, qualitative fieldwork, survey data, and a case study of the Food Sovereignty Platform’s (FSP) resistance to Ghana’s Plant Variety Protection Bill.In the analysis, I identify recurring manifestations of contradiction across Ghana’s flagship agricultural policies, including inclusion without redistribution, productivity pursued without ecological sustainability, and market integration implemented in the absence of structural safeguards. These dynamics translate into uneven and constrained capabilities among smallholders. At the same time, I show that these conditions also generate pressures for collective political mobilisation. Survey evidence indicates that land access constraints, seed insecurity, and infrastructural deficits function as politicising pressures within farmer organisations. The FSP case demonstrates how such pressures are aggregated into counter-hegemonic coalitions that contest dominant agrarian paradigms and articulate alternative pathways centred on food sovereignty, agroecology, and farmer autonomy.This thesis contributes to debates on agrarian transformation by demonstrating how Ghana’s agricultural development paradigm embodies structural contradictions. It extends the CA by situating capability expansion within processes of political struggle and institutional contestation, and it advances critical realist scholarship by empirically integrating structure and agency. In the analysis, I offer a multi-scalar explanation of how struggles over agrarian futures emerge and why just and sustainable agricultural transformation depends on both structural change and organised farmer agency.
Bernard Ekumah (Thu,) studied this question.