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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

Across agrarian lifeworlds, 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 medium-scale farmers in Namibia, Tanzania and Ghana.

In Namibia, men with urban careers are the primary investors in farming and livestock, engaging narratives of "returning as sons of the land,” securing kinship lineages, or developing a structurally neglected region. Yet while presenting this as an investment in collective futures, they fuel the contemporary land rush and exclude younger relatives from accessing family assets. In Tanzania, investors, often with political ties or functions, present themselves as development actors that modernise agriculture and improve local livelihoods beyond pure profit motivation. “Serving one’s community,” however, often means rendering smallholders dependent on services and inputs, while consolidating land. Similarly, in Ghana, returning migrants, local elites, or urban investors frame investments as promoting modernisation and community development. Yet these investments frequently generate tensions over land access and prior use, while reorganising economies through selective inclusion, service provision, and claims to authority grounded in both customary and state-backed legitimacy.

Across all cases, we show, “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.