Deliberative Governance in Asymmetric Economic Settings: Towards Economic Democracy in Agri-business Partnerships?

I am proposing to do the PhD as an external candidate, building on both completed research and my ongoing work at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), including research being done in collaboration with colleagues at WUR. Although funding constraints mean that I am not able to write my PhD thesis as part of my day-to-day employment at IDS, the institute has encouraged my plans, enabling me to take a temporary career break to complete the thesis. This recognises both the importance of the PhD for my career trajectory, in line with guidance I have received from the IDS Fellowship Review and Promotions Board, and the relevance of my thesis within IDS’s overall strategy. I plan to build the thesis from 4 published or soon to be published scientific articles, which I have researched over the last 10 years at IDS, drawing these together through an introduction and a synthesising/discussion chapter. These papers are in the field of inclusive development and partnering processes, particularly in agri-food value chains in Africa and Asia, and all apply an interdisciplinary perspective to generate a socialised study of economic processes. With this thesis, I aim to make an original contribution to knowledge by firstly bringing a theoretically informed analysis of deliberative institutional configurations between unequal actors in the agri-food sector. In particular, I intend that this analysis will take seriously power dynamics and the factors that shape these dynamics, challenging assumptions of what is or is not possible under these conditions. Secondly, I aim to use the rich empirical data I have gathered over the past 10 years, with upwards of 45 detailed case studies, to generate middle-range theories of processes of economic democratisation. I see these as having relevance for both scholarship and practice, generating new propositions that can be empirically tested in my future work, such as through action research. In this sense, I aim to set out an academic agenda that will shape my programme of work during and in the years following the PhD.