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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

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.