Short Abstract

The panel invites papers that move beyond a purely instrumental, resource-based understanding of land and agriculture in Africa, exploring the ethical and socio-economic dimensions across diverse regional contexts. It draws on comparative case studies of African communities and agricultural systems.

Long Abstract

Land and agriculture remain central to Africa's development trajectories, yet policies and economic framing often reduce them to instrumental resources as inputs to be optimized for productivity, market integration, or food security targets. This panel asks for trade-offs or blind spots when land and agricultural livelihoods are understood only through the resource lens – and what emerges when we instead center the perspectives, values, and lived realities of those who work the land: smallholder farmers, pastoralists, and rural communities across Africa.

Drawing on the conference theme of "African Prisms," this panel brings together case studies that view land and agriculture through multiple disciplinary and empirical lenses of ethics, socio-economic analysis, and policy engagement to reveal the plurality of meanings agriculture holds across different African contexts. Main contributions include research on relational valuation of land and nature among agroecological smallholder farmers, examining rural livelihood diversification, food security and policy engagement with case studies that give a glimpse into the diverse realities of African Agriculture. Together, these will illustrate how human-land relationships are shaped by culture, identity, ecology, and institutional structures.

We invite papers that critically engage with human-land-agriculture relationships from any disciplinary perspective, including but not limited to environmental ethics, agrarian studies, political ecology, development economics, and agriculture. We particularly welcome perspectives that challenge singular, extractive, or purely market-based narratives of African agriculture, and that bring to the fore knowledge, values, and agency of those directly engaged in land-based livelihoods.

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