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International Development and Studies

Sidelining policy recipients: National agriculture policy decision-making and smallholder farmers in Botswana Wandipa Mualefhe*, Wandipa Mualefhe,

This paper presents developing findings on a Botswana-based project investigating the effects of policy and programming decision-making on bureaucratic burdens experienced by some of the most vulnerable policy recipients in agriculture: smallholder farmers.

Botswana, a country especially vulnerable to climate change due to its semi-arid climate, also happens to have a relatively large farming population — mostly made up of the poor, who farm primarily for subsistence. Since independence in 1966, the government, in its socialist democratic powers, has supported farming populations in attempts to raise Botswana’s farming capacity beyond food self-sufficiency to food sovereignty. However, the nation is yet to meet even the former goal.

In this paper, I share findings that show how the country, through its Ministry of Lands and Agriculture (MoLA), has worked to reach its goals through policy and programming, and the ways in which this effort — including the systems that coordinate it — has inadvertently undermined the MoLA’s success and sidelined policy recipients. Necessarily, this investigation incorporates a discussion of power, explicating the ways it can be wielded by those socially and politically dominant to further their own interests and maintain existing structures. Drawing from feminist theory and the ideas of social theorists including Weber, Foucault, and Marx, I illustrate how, in this Botswana case study, the systems ostensibly built to further social justice ultimately compromise it.

I close the paper with some available opportunities for the MoLA’s practitioners to lessen bureaucratic burden and overall improve their service delivery, thereby allowing for policy recipients, especially those most vulnerable, to receive the resources and services they need to maintain and even improve their livelihoods.