Authors: Fredrick Ajwang1 | Saurabh Arora2 | Joanes Atela3 | Joel Onyango3 | Mohammad Kyari
Abstract
To address intensifying social and environmental challenges, development policy must learn from inclusions and exclusions of past discourses. We analyse Kenya’s post-colonial agricultural policy discourse. Our analysis reveals a near exclusive focus on the promotion of agricultural modernisation based on industrial farm inputs, a bureaucratic state and/or ‘the liberalised market’. It was with this thrust to modernise that smallholders (and other farmers) were generally seen as aligning. Smallholders’ agency to diverge from modernisation was thus marginalised in the policy dis course. Overall then, the promotion of diverse agro-ecological and other farmer-led directions of development was largely missing from Kenya’s policy landscape.