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Paper short abstract

A decolonial institutional analysis showing that smallholder exclusion in African agri-food markets is a structural, postcolonial field institutional arrangement. Using an East African case, the paper outlines directions for alternative local architectures that enhance farmer agency.

Paper long abstract

Efforts to integrate African smallholders into commercial agri-food markets—through contracts, standards, digital platforms, cooperatives, and financial inclusion—have intensified over the past two decades. Yet most farmers remain in precarious, low-return positions. Conventional deficit framings attribute this marginality to weak farmer capacity. This paper challenges such interpretations by combining constructionist institutional theory with a decolonial political economy perspective and insights from a large-scale systematic review.

Drawing on Fligstein’s conception of markets as fields, Beckert’s emphasis on coordination and expectations, and Zelizer’s analysis of classificatory schemes, the paper conceptualises markets as historically contingent field settlements shaped by power, culture, and institutional rules. Integrating Stefan Ouma’s analyses of global agri-food capitalism and the racialised spatial ordering of value chains extends this framework, revealing how African market fields remain embedded in colonial geographies of extraction and control. Departing from these theories, the paper argues that smallholder exclusion is best understood as a postcolonial field outcome: a systemic rationing of participation produced by architectures that externalise risk while concentrating coordination and value capture.

To illustrate the challenges of reconfiguring such entrenched structures, the paper presents an East African case in which the author sought to assemble alternative infrastructures—a digital farmer database, a community-based barter exchange, and a logistics and aggregation centre—intended to enhance smallholder agency. The difficulties encountered highlight both the possibilities and constraints of building new market configurations from below.

The paper concludes by outlining directions for reimagining market architectures that move beyond deficit-based inclusion toward decolonial and equitable forms of participation.