Paper short abstract:

This paper explores credit/debt relations in rural development projects funded through social and impact investing, showing how they represent confrontational spaces where groups of actors join forces or oppose each other, and sites where existing global inequalities are reproduced and contested.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to explore processes of credit/debt signification, negotiation and contestation in rural development projects funded through 'social' and 'impact' investing. In particular, it will focus on the role that discourses and practices around credit/debt play in the enactment of the relationship between service providers and intended beneficiaries. It will do so by presenting the case of a development project implemented in Ghana by SustAgric-Africa (SAA), a social enterprise aiming to lift smallholder farmers in rural Africa out of poverty through the promotion of sustainable agriculture. The paper contends that the variable understandings and manifestations of credit/debt in SAA’s arrangement are based on differing and sometimes conflicting ethical horizons and worldviews. In this sense, credit/debt comes to represent a liminal space where different groups of actors join forces or contest each other, in processes where reciprocal representations and modes of agency are constantly redefined. The paper concludes that tensions around credit/debt in ‘impact’ and ‘social’ investments’ arrangements reveal processes that tend to reproduce existing hegemonies and unequal patterns of wealth accumulation, but also open spaces for their contestation by actors often perceived as sitting at their margins.