Longitudinal case study reveals that state-driven historical narratives trigger backfiring and blinding during cross-border expansion, highlighting liabilities of rhetorical history.
Key Points
To examine how governments use historical narratives to push corporate internationalization and determine why these rhetorical strategies can lead to project failure.
Conducted a longitudinal historical case study of ProSAVANA, a major Brazilian agricultural cooperation project in Mozambique operating between 2003 and 2015.
Analyzed the strategic framing by state actors alongside the subsequent contestation and mobilization by local and peripheral stakeholders over time.
Demonstrated that strategic narratives cause backfiring when peripheral stakeholders mobilize historical counter-narratives that transform purported state advantages into political liabilities.
Identified blinding as a novel mechanism where overreliance on selective history leads planners to disregard local institutional differences and emergent project risks.
Established that multi-stakeholder contestation over rhetorical framing drove the ultimate collapse of the state-sponsored initiative.