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Mechanisms of Inclusion: Evidence from Zambia’s Farmer Organisations

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Abstract

Policymakers and donors increasingly rely on farmer organisations (FOs) when implementing rural development strategies, though research suggests that targeted groups such as poorer households tend to participate less in FOs than richer ones. Here, we discuss mechanisms that may contribute towards the inclusion of disadvantaged households, using primary data from Zambian FOs involved in implementing an agricultural subsidy programme, and applying qualitative comparative analysis to identify individual and combined effects of four explanatory factors on inclusion. Our results suggest long-term commitment as a necessary condition. We further identify three alternative pathways that explain inclusion while within-case analysis describes their underlying causal mechanism: inclusion develops in FOs that show commitment and either provide financial services to vulnerable members, promote social identities or compensate disadvantaged members for not being able to access subsidised inputs. These results can explain why some FOs are more effective than others in reaching disadvantaged target groups.

Résumé

Les décideurs et les bailleurs de fonds ont de plus en plus recours aux organisations d'agriculteurs (OA) lors de la mise en œuvre de stratégies de développement rural, bien que des recherches suggèrent que les groupes ciblés tels que les ménages les plus pauvres tendent à moins participer à ces organisations que les ménages plus riches. Nous discutons ici des mécanismes pouvant contribuer à l'inclusion des ménages défavorisés, en utilisant les données primaires d’OA zambiennes impliquées dans la mise en œuvre d'un programme de subventions agricoles et en appliquant une analyse qualitative comparative pour identifier les effets individuels et combinés de quatre facteurs explicatifs sur l'inclusion. Nos résultats suggèrent que l'engagement à long terme est une condition nécessaire. Nous identifions en outre trois voies alternatives qui expliquent l'inclusion, tandis que l'analyse intra-cas décrit leur mécanisme causal sous-jacent: l'inclusion se développe dans les OA qui montrent leur engagement et fournissent des services financiers aux membres vulnérables, promeuvent les identités sociales ou indemnisent les membres désavantagés pour ne pas avoir accès à des subventions. Ces résultats peuvent expliquer pourquoi certaines OA sont plus efficaces que d’autres pour toucher des groupes cibles défavorisés.

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Notes

  1. We also considered the elderly as a disadvantaged group of farmers, as their physical capacity limits their performance of agricultural activities, but decided not to use them as a measure of inclusion, as they tend to receive more support from their extended families than do widows. Consequently, the vulnerability of older people had to be considered case by case while their individual household situations were difficult for interview partners to evaluate.

  2. We used the average share of widows among rural women in Solwezi as a reference point to set anchor points. In 2010, 8.18 percent of the 36,935 women in the rural area of the district were registered as widows (CSO 2013).

  3. To decide whether a necessary condition is also meaningful, its empirical relevance has to be assessed (Goertz 2006; Ragin 2006; Schneider 2018b; Schneider and Wagemann 2012). The coverage and ‘relevance of necessity’ (RoN) indicator informs about the trivialness (the condition set is much bigger than the outcome set) and the irrelevance (the condition is close to a constant) of a necessary condition. Despite meeting the minimum threshold, the condition of long-term commitment scores relatively low on the RoN-indicator, making it difficult to claim it as fully relevant as a necessary condition. Looking at the possibility of COM being a constant, our truth table (see Table 3) reveals that the condition is present in almost all the cases (12 out of 15). A possible explanation for this result may relate to our case selection where we relied on government officials to identify potential FOs. We suspect that officials may have subconsciously pointed us to FOs that were better known to them, possibly because they have shown stronger commitment in the past. Given the relatively low RoN-score, more cases would be needed to decide whether long-term commitment qualifies as a fully relevant necessary condition.

  4. We performed a separate analysis on the absence of inclusion. We applied a consistency threshold of 0.8 and obtained the following parsimonious solution ~ COM → ~ INC, suggesting that the absence of commitment is sufficient for non-inclusion (solution consistency: 0.84, solution coverage: 0.44). This result is in line with our expectations as the opposite situation of a necessary condition is often found to be sufficient for explaining the negated outcome (Schneider and Wagemann 2007).

  5. Three types of solutions exist, depending on how logical remainders are treated. According to Baumgartner (2015), parsimonious solutions reflect causal structures better than the conservative and intermediate solutions.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Prof. Markus Hanisch, Katasha Sinyangwe, Mercy Changwe, the Centre for Rural Development (SLE) and the Förderverein für Agrar- und Gartenbauwissenschaften of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin for their support. We also thank the  three anonymous referees for their useful comments.

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  1. Division of Economics of Agricultural Cooperatives, Department of Agricultural Economics, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Luisenstraße 53, 10117, Berlin, Germany

    Margitta Minah & Agustina Malvido Pérez Carletti

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  1. Margitta Minah
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  2. Agustina Malvido Pérez Carletti
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Correspondence to Margitta Minah.

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Minah, M., Malvido Pérez Carletti, A. Mechanisms of Inclusion: Evidence from Zambia’s Farmer Organisations. Eur J Dev Res 31, 1318–1340 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41287-019-00212-8

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