Political Space and the Quality of Participation in Rural Africa: A Case from Senegal

National Policy Versus Local Power: The Lafia Project in Nigeria

“…This diversity has given rise to enormous variation in systems of agricultural production and rural social hierarchies with differential connections to national structures of class and power. This diversity recommends that inquiries into the effects of the state on rural productivity need to be grounded in an appreciation of the manner in which state-peasant relations are shaped by socio-economic divisions and other dimensions of rural social geographies in local-cum-regional settings (Barker 1987). This article provides an example of how social relations of production and structures of power in local I regional settings, in combination with statesanctioned modes of participation, shape the nature of peasant responses to and determine the fate of attempts by the Nigerian state to reform peasant production.…”

“…Aptly dubbed the "recalcitrant peasant perspective" by Barker (1987), the first is represented by Goran Hyden (1981, for whom peasants are a social category entrapped in a pre-capitalist environment who undertake production primarily to secure their means of subsistence. Hyden maintains that rural petite bourgeoisies are the prime mediators of relations between peasants and external classes, and enjoy preferential access to productive resources emanating from the state.…”