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In this thesis, I use experimental and quasi-experimental data from 25 villages and a total of 1,105 farmers from eastern DRC to investigate the relationship among agricultural training, the adoption of agricultural technologies, crop productivity, and household food insecurity and dietary diversity. I present evidence that contributes to narrow the gap in the literature on the role of input subsidies fostering small-scale farmers' uptake of productivity-enhancing technologies, how farmer field school and farmer-to-farmer trainings affect the adoption of agricultural technologies, how F2F training may reduce the costs of FFS implementation, how adoption materializes on yields of food crops, and how training through the adoption of improved agricultural technologies impacts household food insecurity and the diet diversification of target households. As a complement to econometric evidence and in order to understand the main findings, I also discuss behavioral features and farmer driven initiatives which somehow condition these impacts. Throughout the four main chapters, I identify practical implications that are highly important for the design and implementation of new programs and policies aimed to address agricultural productivity issues and reduce household food insecurity. In Chapter 1 I develop a general introduction to the research which discusses the evolution of agricultural extension in the last few decades, and describe FFS and F2F training methodologies. Chapter 2 provides a detailed description of the project intervention, technologies promoted, research settings and the data collection process. In Chapter 3, I report the results of an experimental study that analyses the impact of one-shot input starter packs on the adoption of productivity-enhancing complementary practices, which have the potential to maximize the impact of starter pack inputs. Additionally, I assess the levels of persistence on farmers’ use of improved crop seeds which are included in

Sub-Saharan Africa countries face the challenge of reducing rural poverty and reversing the declining trends of agricultural productivity and the high levels of soil nutrient depletion. Despite of numerous efforts and investments, high levels of poverty and resource degradation persist in African agriculture. The Millennium Development Goals Report (MDGR) states that the majority of people living below the poverty line of $1.25 a day belong to Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and South Asia. About two thirds of the global rural population lives in mixed crop-livestock systems (CLS), typical of SSA, where interactions between crops and livestock activities are important for the subsistence of smallholders. CLS are characterized by high degree of biophysical and economic heterogeneity, complex and diversified production system that frequently involves a combination of several subsistence and cash crops and livestock. Increasing crop productivity is clearly a key element to improve living standards and to take these people out of poverty. However, agricultural productivity in most of SSA has been stagnant or increased slowly. In addition, the likely negative impacts of climate change on agriculture have accentuated the vulnerability of smallholders. The international research community has once more the eyes on SSA with the recently proposed post-2015 MDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals that emphasize the need to achieve sustainable development globally by 2030 by promoting economic development, environmental sustainability, good governance and social inclusion. Governments and scientists are making considerable efforts to develop strategies that include structural transformations of the different sectors of the economy in search of the recipe to achieve the SDGs. Most of these strategies are based on policy and technology interventions that seek to achieve the “win-win” outcomes and move from the usual “tradeoffs” between poverty-productivity-sustainability to synergies.

Thesis title: Institutional Change and Economic Development: Evidence from Natural and Artefactual Field Experiments in Ethiopia Mequanint Biset Melesse Abstract Institutions are the essential underpinning of economic development. A large volume of empirical literature has documented conclusive evidence supporting this hypothesis. Yet, our knowledge on how to bring about institutional change and improvement is still quite imperfect. Moreover, putting in place good institutions that have undergirded the growth of the developed world has not always produced desired results in developing countries. This thesis studies the complex relationship between institutional change and economic development. Its primary focus is on the endogenous formation of institutions and outcomes of institutional changes on the quality and sustainability of other institutions and the dynamics of economic development. It employs randomized field experiments, propensity score matching and instrumental variables approaches to tackle the problem of causal inference. The results indicate that an effective institutional development requires a good knowledge of the interaction between formal and informal institutions and the complex dynamics that such interaction entails. Customary institutions are malleable. Local institutions condition the success and effects of formal institutional changes in important ways. Institutional change is a nonlinear, complex and non-ergodic process, where multiple intended and unintended outcomes are possible. Overall, the results indicate that formal and informal institutions interact out of entrenched corners with both constructive and deleterious repercussions for economic development.

Development support must be able to prove its effectiveness. Impact evaluation is a way to generate this information. The thesis is about the design of these impact evaluations and how research methods can be combined to obtain credible evidence on effectiveness. It contrasts two approaches to impact evaluation design, ‘randomistas’ (Does it work?) and ‘realistas’ (For whom does it work, and under what conditions?), and distils seven principles for research design that create synergy between these two approaches. The thesis covers various development interventions. The main research concerns a Bolivian grant fund that supports investments in processing by farmer groups. To assess the effectiveness of this fund it was necessary to develop and test a new tool to measure organisational strength of these groups, called Tension Containment Capacity and apply a new method of data analysis, Qualitative Comparative Analysis. Interestingly, grants to the older, larger and stronger organisations proved particularly unsuccessful.

Seasonal floodplains are water bodies that retain water for 5-6 months during which they are suitable to grow fish and other aquatic animals. Out of 2.8 million ha of medium and deep-flooded areas, about 1.5 million ha are estimated to be suitable for Community-Based Fish Culture (CBFC). WorldFish had undertaken a five-year interdisciplinary action research project from 2005-2010 with the overall aim of enhancing the productivity of seasonally occurring floodwaters for the improved and sustained benefit of the livelihoods of the poor. My involvement in this project was as PhD Scholar from 2007-2009 for understanding the different and complex institutional arrangements and its overall impact of governing Community-Based Fish Culture in seasonal floodplains for the sustainable use and maximization of benefits to the targeted people of Bangladesh. Six seasonal floodplains in different areas of Bangladesh were selected under the action research project implemented by the Department of Fisheries in collaboration with the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council and the Bangladesh Fisheries Research Institute. For the action research which is the subject of this thesis, three seasonal floodplains were selected in the Brahamaputra, the Padma and the Teesta River Basins located at Mymensingh, Rajshahi and Rangpur districts, respectively. Another three floodplains were selected as control sites in the same river basins located near to the projects sites. The control sites were included in the economic study (Chapters 4 and 5) only. All the six floodplains belong to two types of ownership categories: public floodplains surrounded by private lands. My thesis is broadly divided into a sociological and an economic part, mainly because of methodological differences. Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 discuss the institutional arrangements and the power and decision-making process of Community-Based Fish Culture management. Chapter 4 addresses the overall economic impact of technical and ins

Keywords: Base of the pyramid, Bottom of the pyramid, Supply chains, Export market integration, Market learning, Developing and Emerging countries, Exploitation and Exploration, Institutional arrangements, Transaction cost economics, Livelihood performance, BoP producers Abstract Organizing supply chains that are based in producer groups that live in conditions of widespread poverty and weak institutional support (sometimes referred to as the Base of the Pyramid [BoP] producers) is challenging. These challenges have predominantly been studied in the development literature, while the marketing perspective has received less attention. Drawing on both transaction cost and market learning theories, the thesis integrates producers’ opportunity exploitation and exploration processes with the institutional framework adopted in the development literature to understand producers’ integration with export markets. Overall, the findings show that exploitation mediates between drivers investigated by development economists (quality of infrastructure, microcredit, and community culture) and integration with export markets. The results show that BoP producers’ export market integration also depends on the institutional arrangements that exporting companies offer. The results indicate that contrary to more-developed settings like those in Western Europe and Northern America, there is no need to develop both opportunity exploration and exploitation in environments characterized by scarce opportunities with relatively high purchasing powers. The findings imply that developing competencies that enable to produce the demanded quality are crucial in seizing export market integration opportunities.

Both preferences and institutions are central to economic theory. Insofar as they cannot be taken as given, it is important to understand how they are formed, and how they “respond” to shocks. This thesis investigates the endogenous formation of preferences and institutions. It presents field-experimental evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa – specifically Uganda, Sierra Leone, and Ethiopia – gradually zooming out through different levels of responses to shocks. It starts by looking at the formation of individual preferences in utero and during childhood. Next, it explores the endogeneity of rational choice among adults. Finally, it looks at the cumulative outcome of these responses in terms of changes in local norms and informal institutions. Shocks are thought of in their broadest possible definition. Conflict is a shock, but so is the introduction of exogenously planned and implemented institutions, or the penetration of statutory law into predominantly customary settings. Chapter 2 investigates the fetal origins of preferences for cooperation. I study the effect of prenatal trauma on the cooperation of those born during the Lord’s Resistance Army insurgency in northern Uganda. I find that a rise in the relative length of the index finger with respect to the ring finger – a marker for prenatal hormonal shock – reduces the child’s probability of contribution to the public good. I interpret this as evidence that prenatal trauma may affect later-life individual preferences, and that the nine months in utero may be more important than previously thought. Chapter 3 looks at the preferences for competition towards in- and out-groups, in relation to conflict exposure. I study aggressiveness and willingness to compete among youth in Sierra Leone, using the group dynamics generated by a local football tournament to separate in- and out-group behavior. I find that football players that experienced more intense exposure to violence are more likely to get a foul card during a ga

In this thesis, I show that social capital has an important role in the evaluation of development initiatives targeting agricultural innovation. Social capital and agricultural innovation are naturally linked from an innovation system perspective in which innovations result from the integration of knowledge from various actors and stakeholders. In chapter 1, I identify the three research questions upon which this thesis is based. First, how are social capital and agricultural innovation related? Second, can development initiatives increase agricultural innovation by building social capital? Third, does the initial level of social capital increase the success of these development initiatives in enhancing agricultural innovation? These question mainly relate to the increasing number of policies, programs and project that include beneficiaries in the design, management and decision making process. In chapter 2, I elaborate on the main concepts underlying this thesis including social capital, how it relates to development initiatives in the agricultural sector, and how it can be measured. I broadly define social capital as the participation of individuals in formal and informal networks, the norms that define these networks and the trust these individuals have within and outside these networks. Participation in networks is structural social capital, whereas norms and trust within and between these networks is cognitive social capital. I distinguish four dimensions of social capital: structural bonding, structural bridging, cognitive bonding and cognitive bridging. In this thesis bonding and bridging social capital is akin to social capital inside and outside the village. Agricultural innovation is defined in terms of improved land and crop management practices, an important area of agricultural innovation for small scale producers. In chapter 3 till 7, I empirically investigate the relationships between social capital, agricultural innovation and two types of developmen

As a result of increasing population pressure, the average farm sizes in the savannah regions of West Africa have reduced. By consequence, farmers can no longer rely on fallowing to maintain soil fertility. For long farmers have therefore resorted to other methods. The most common on-farm strategies to cope with reduced fallow lengths are rotation of cereals with nitrogen fixing legumes and crop-livestock integration. The most important component of crop-livestock integration is the feeding of crop residues to livestock and the subsequent use of manure as fertilizer. At the same time, many farmers can no longer rely on farming as their sole source of income and diversify into off-farm income sources such as petty trading; local manufacturing jobs; or migrate (seasonally) to large urban areas. Hence, the coping strategies in the wake of increased population pressure are manifold, and the rural population is far from homogenous. The aim of this study is to examine in detail three types of heterogeneity and their relationships with agricultural production. These three types of heterogeneity are: (1) heterogeneity in farmer goals and objectives, (2) heterogeneity in (on-farm) soil fertility resources, and (3) heterogeneity in crop-livestock integration. We thereby explore how differences in household characteristics and farming strategies relate to the three types of heterogeneity distinguished, and how this affects soil fertility levels. These types of heterogeneity affect production (decisions) and farmer soil fertility resources in different ways. First, developed with the purpose of analysing the ex ante impact of policies and technologies on farmers’ soil nutrient use, bioeconomic models frequently assume that farmers are homogenous in goals and preferences, i.e., their underlying utility function. Similarly, many studies on smallholder productivity and efficiency only include observable household characteristics and thereby implicitly assume that the relationship