Commercialization and development in Africa: actors, technologies and politics

Commercialization has become increasingly central to economy, society, and development in Africa, reorganizing social, economic, and ecological life around market and profit logics, relationships, and practices in areas previously shaped by different institutional, political, and moral-economic systems (thus, ‘under-commercialised’ in capitalist terms). Yet commercialization remains relatively under-theorised and under-studied and is often conflated with privatization, marketization, and neoliberalism, or subsumed within analyses of sector-specific processes.This special issue instead regards commercialization as a major empirical phenomenon under capitalism, in Africa and beyond, that requires greater analytical attention. It puts commercialization at the centre of analysis and offers a cross-sectoral, cross-country, and inter-disciplinary theoretical and empirical enquiry into the forms it takes, the processes through which it is enacted, and its social, ecological, and economic consequences. It brings together studies of healthcare, water provision, agriculture, wildlife conservation, cultural production, and digital sociality in Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Namibia to examine how commercialization is operationalized, embedded, legitimized, and contested across diverse African contexts.We conceptualize commercialization as a constitutive process of capitalist transformation through which institutions, practices, relationships, and forms of value are increasingly reorganized around investment, monetization, revenue generation, profitability, and commercial exchange. These processes materialize through commercial projects and ventures, campaigns and launches, promises and expectations, as well as pressures, contestations, and fallouts. We trace the contours of commercial restructuring across African contexts, foregrounding the actors and alliances, power and politics, and technologies and transformations involved in the commercializing of African societies.Across the cases, the papers show how commercialization occurs through hybrid configurations linking states, development agencies, corporations, financial institutions, platforms, consumers, and citizens; how commercial rationalities and requirements extend into areas organized through public, social, cultural, and ecological values, with significant effects; and how digital and financial infrastructures create new mechanisms of calculation, valuation, and value extraction. Rather than a uniform or seamless process, commercialization generates uneven and locally-specific distributions of value, power, risk, and opportunity, while contributing to the reshaping of social relations and social order, development interventions, and the trajectories of contemporary capitalism in Africa. Commercialization is a major and distinct force in contemporary capitalism, and increasingly a form of hegemonic common sense, contributing to the ongoing making of commercial society in Africa.