Convened by Katarzyna Cieslik and David Hulme, University of Manchester, Global Development Institute, Daniel Adu Ankrah, University of Ghana, Department of Agricultural Extension, and Aarti Krishnan, University of Manchester, Alliance Manchester Business School

Classic theories of agrarian change, rooted in assumptions of peasant - proletariat transitions, industrialization, and agricultural modernization, do not capture the present-day dynamics of rural transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Agriculture is no longer the singular foundation of rural livelihoods. Instead, agrarian economies are increasingly shaped by new drivers and producing new outcomes that demand fresh theoretical lenses.

Three intertwined processes stand out. First, diversified livelihoods have displaced agriculture’s centrality, with service-sector expansion, peri-urban farming, and remittances becoming the defining features of rural economies. Second, land-use change, much of it driven by corporate actors involved in illicit or semi-legal mining, deforestation, and extraction, reconfigures rural landscapes and livelihoods beyond agrarian production alone. Third, digital technologies are reshaping rural labour: mobile money, platform economies, and digital services open pathways that bypass farming altogether, while also generating new forms of dependence and precarity. 

These forces are unfolding as rural Africa continues to lag behind other developing regions on nearly every measure of inequality and poverty. The urgent task is to develop new theoretical frameworks that explain both the erosion of agriculture’s centrality and the rise of fragmented, precarious, and uneven rural futures. At stake are broader questions about rural Africa’s place in global transitions - from climate change and the green economy to digitalization and shifting trade regimes - and how new inequalities and opportunities are shaped by gender, generation, and social differentiation.

This panel calls for contributions that interrogate these shifting dynamics and asks:

• How can we theorize rural economies in terms of agency and resistance in the context of corporate land appropriation, digital precarity, and ecological dispossession?

• How do technology-enabled livelihoods, youth employment crises, and semi-legal corporate land deals challenge the assumptions of classic agrarian theories?

• Which conceptual approaches can capture rural Africa’s lived realities while rethinking ‘agrarian change’ as a category of analysis?

The papers presented in this panel will seek to reconceptualize agrarian change in Africa as central to shaping sustainable futures through locally grounded responses to global challenges.