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- Convenors:
-
Sandro Simon
(University of Cologne)
Cyriaque Hakizimana (University of the Western Cape)
Happiness Moshi (Aga Khan University)
Azindow Iddrisu (University for Development Studies)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel traces practices and framings of “moral investments” and the moralization of larger economic life in Africa. It seeks to unpack the promises, contradictions, and ambiguities of investments and their framings to examine how virtue, profit, and power intertwine in shaping African futures.
Long Abstract
What does it mean for investment in Africa to be moral? Across the continent, investors, states, and communities increasingly invoke notions of reciprocity, responsibility, social affiliation, or stewardship for projects that claim to balance profit with social and ecological good. Yet the promises of “moral investment” often sit uneasily alongside persistent inequalities, environmental degradation, and the reproduction of colonial relations of value.
Various concepts seek to frame the diverse narratives and practices of moral investments across endogenous and foreign capital and sectors such as farming, conservation, hospitality, infrastructure, or finance. “Ubuntu Economics” seeks to bridge socialism and capitalism by embedding values of collective care and well-being within market systems; whereas “Africapitalism” draws on “ubuntu” ethics of interdependence to imagine African enterprise as a pathway to shared prosperity. Also “Ujamaa” socialism with its emphasis on communal production and exchange is still invoked. Other notions include “Conscious Capitalism” or the fields of “Islamic Finance”, “Social Entrepreneurship”, “Impact Investing” or “Community Based Development”.
This panel invites contributions that interrogate moral economies of investment and the moralization of larger economic life in Africa together with a critical reflection on the respective concepts that frame them. How are claims of ethical or “African” capitalism enacted, negotiated, framed, or contested? What are their politics and political affiliations, e.g. to customary authorities? What forms of value, inequality, or belonging do they (re)generate and what potential do they hold for equitable possibilities in a polarized world? And in what ways do they become vehicles for elite self-(re)making and arenas to negotiate identities between global entrepreneurial-capitalist ideals and situated ideals of care and communality? We welcome empirically rich and theoretically evocative papers that unpack the promises, contradictions, and ambiguities of moral investment and their framings and examine how virtue, profit, and power intertwine in shaping African futures.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
South Africa’s International Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) is a capitalist response to climate change. For Donors, NGOs, investors and unions it also a (contested) moral investment. This paper explores how South Africa's JETP links economic progress, moral capitalism and climate justice
Paper long abstract
South Africa’s International Just Energy Transition Partnership is an explicitly capitalist response to climate change. Its is loans-based process aimed at revitalising and decarbonising South Africa’s energy system, with entrepreneurship and skills training promising prosperity for economically displaced coal workers. For actors all throughout this assemblage, South Africa’s Just Transition is a moral investment: donor nations and Global North technology companies will provide innovative solutions to global warming; Independent Power Producers respond to government corruption; NGOs ensure that South Africa develops “a learning culture” as mining becomes decreasingly possible; and young, black, South Africans see entrepreneurial opportunities as enabling forms of valorised wealth creation that apartheid denied to their families.
South Africa’s history and its position in the global economy ensures that the larger pools of national and international capital involved in its energy transition will be linked to white actors. Debates over the role of finance in responses to climate change are intimately tied to questions of race; with resistance to climate action frequently (publicly) associated with Black South Africans and the institutions that claim to represent them. This paper will unpack the homeostatic cluster of actors and investments that link economic progress, moral capitalism and climate justice. It will consider how their promises interact, intersect and contradict each other and how they are co-productive with South Africa’s post-apartheid political economy.
Paper short abstract
This paper shows how Ghana’s cocoa economy is sustained through moral investment alongside market demands. It discusses practices that redistribute responsibility, uphold infrastructures, and stabilise value production in an increasingly uncertain world, thereby reconfiguring capitalism from within.
Paper long abstract
Cocoa production in Ghana is sustained by scientific authority, farmer livelihoods, and the national and global economy. Scientific recommendations, such as cutting productive cocoa trees to control viral disease, often clash with farmers’ immediate survival needs in a capitalist framework. Officers, scientists, and farmers navigate these tensions through waiting, silence, and respect to seniority. These are forms of moral investment: relational labour that redistributes responsibility, absorbs uncertainty, and keeps economic futures open without requiring constant technical or managerial intervention. Such authority functions as an epistemic and economic infrastructure. These practices make possible Ghana’s distinctive positioning within global cocoa capitalism, prioritising quality over volume, sustaining smallholder farming, and maintaining national economic credibility despite persistent infrastructural breakdowns. Situating this ethnography within debates on Africapitalism and ethical African capitalism, the paper presents moral investment as a constitutive condition of capitalist value-making. Responsibility, rather than profit alone, becomes the central object of investment. Moral endurance substitutes for technical certainty; relational authority substitutes for managerial control. As long argued in previous ethnographies, Ghanaian cocoa economy reveals a reconfiguration of capitalism itself, one in which moral labour, relational personhood, and more-than-human attunement are infrastructural to value production. By foregrounding moral investment as lived practice, the paper contributes an empirically grounded Southern theory of ethical capitalism. It demonstrates how African institutions actively remake capitalism’s conditions of possibility from within, offering us critical insight into how virtue, power, and economic futures intertwine in a polarised world.
Paper short abstract
The “Wall Street consensus” development finance paradigm combines modernist “big push” infrastructure development with neoliberal desire for foreign investment. European sustainable investment funds and Guinean rural elites alike use these state created opportunities for private enrichment.
Paper long abstract
“How to make money and contribute to the development of Africa?” This was the opening line during an “Africa Finance Breakfasts” series event at Jones Day in Paris in May 2019. The financers, lawyers and development experts present there that morning were involved with the most recent but now defunct wave of development finance—the Wall Street Consensus. Having come to being with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (2015) and the rise of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria in international finance, the so-called ESG boom, the Wall Street Consensus sought to use Global North portfolio glut to finance green development projects in the Global South with de-risking mechanisms provided by the destination countries and development banks.
However, dreams of attaining industrial modernity by mobilizing foreign investment are regularly touted by diverse African parties alike. This presentation contrasts and compares the Wall Street consensus sustainable investment vision from one of the key French sustainable investment funds with a marabout-led coalition in rural Guinea seeking to attract and orchestrate foreign capital for infrastructure development in their village.
This presentation summarizes what the moral economy of development came to look like in the 2010s and early 2020s. The neoliberal credo of state competition for foreign investment was recombined with vintage modernist ideas of development as “big push” industrialization. Unlike liberal and neoliberal promotion of the self-organizing virtues of private greed, in this vision of development, state backing is explicitly used to devise personal enrichment opportunities for international finance and local elites alike.
Paper short abstract
This paper traces “moral investment” in agriculture as a contested political project through which actors legitimize land control, brokerage, and elite self-making. The paper argues that moral framings do not simply soften capitalism but actively reconfigure value, inequality, and belonging.
Paper long abstract
In Ghana, agrarian investments are increasingly framed through idioms of responsibility, reciprocity, and social enterprise, promising to align profit with community benefit. Yet such claims unfold within landscapes shaped by unequal tenure security, shifting agrarian policies, and hierarchies of belonging.
This paper examines the moralization of agricultural investment through two ethnographic examples from Ghana. The first is situated in the agro-ecological transition zone, where a medium-scale investor enters farming financed through family remittances from abroad. While presenting the project as modern and beneficial, the investment produces frictions over prior land use, temporary access for landless residents, and conflicts with pastoralists. Moral claims are negotiated through everyday practices of “permission,” selective inclusion, and expectations of secure property and state protection.
The second example comes from northern Ghana, where an elderly returnee after two decades of work for an international organization establishes a farm framed as a “social enterprise.” He provides block-farming plots for women, training for youth, and counseling for other farmers. At the same time, he expands into agro-entrepreneurship through tractor services, input provision, storage infrastructure, and produce purchasing, consolidating influence in local markets. His later installation as a chief further entwines narratives of social responsibility with authority and accumulation.
Across both cases, “moral investment” emerges less as a stable ethical model than as a contested political project through which actors legitimize land control, brokerage, and elite self-making. The paper argues that moral framings do not simply soften capitalism but actively reconfigure value, inequality, and belonging.
Paper short abstract
This paper draws upon my anthropological fieldwork in road infrastructure projects contracted by Chinese construction companies in Kenya to examine how ‘ethical investment’ is constructed, practised, and contested within the context of South-South cooperation.
Paper long abstract
This paper draws upon my anthropological fieldwork in road infrastructure projects contracted by Chinese construction companies in Kenya to examine how ‘ethical investment’ is constructed, practised, and contested within the context of South-South cooperation.
Chinese enterprises and their managers frequently employ moral discourses such as ‘development,’ ‘responsibility,’ ‘endurance,’ ‘efficiency,’ ‘mutual benefit,’ and " China-Africa cooperation‘ to frame infrastructure development as a ’moralised economic practice" distinct from Western capitalist and colonial models, positioning themselves as builders imbued with a spirit of sacrifice and historical mission.
Through detailed ethnographic analysis of construction sites, company camps, offices, and their peripheral social relations, this paper examines how Chinese and Kenyan employees understand, incorporate, and react to such moral discourses. Simultaneously, it analyses how this moralised investment narrative coexists without contradiction with persistent racialised and gendered divisions of labour, disciplinarian management, and unequal value distribution within the labour sphere.
I contend that Chinese-funded infrastructure projects constitute a field of moral negotiation: I observe how participants in the construction—including Kenyan and Chinese grassroots workers, Kenyan middle management, and Chinese senior management —engage in imagining non-Western development and decolonised capitalism, while actively integrating such ethical practices into their lived realities. These endeavours continually clash with the experiences of exhaustion, disillusionment, and resistance among grassroots workers.
This paper does not seek to judge whether these investments are “truly ethical”, but rather treats “ethical investment” as a social practice and power process, analysing how virtue, profit, and power are jointly produced and negotiated within infrastructure projects.