Value Chains and Development Brokers: Engineering Inclusive Agricultural Markets in Jumla, Nepal

Abstract

Over the last several decades, new forms of targeted market development have been embraced as solutions to uneven development and market failures. The popular model of inclusive ‘value chain development’ aims to harness markets to address broader development agendas by means of pro-active, micro-market engineering by development experts. This paper examines how inclusive market-making interventions touch down in an agrarian district in Nepal. It focuses on the role of ‘development brokers’ who are enrolled as market engineers and charged with mediating the tensions between profit-oriented market logics and pro-poor goals. The paper argues that even as value chain development aims to depoliticise market failures, the new forms of state–market–society encounters entailed in market-making can also work to bring markets into view as objects of political practice.