Aaron deGrassi

Graduate Student
BA 2000 (Development Studies) UC Berkeley; MPhil 2004 (Development Studies)University of Sussex, Brighton
Regional focus: Africa, Angola, Burkina Faso, Ghana, India, Mozambique

I am interested in various aspects of African rural development. My experience began from understanding the details of agricultural production in relation with broader contexts, and have encompassed a range of topics and locales.

Keywords: agro-ecology, biotechnology, bridging academic divides, culture, decentralization, farmer organizations, gender, institutional ethnography, interdisciplinarity, land, marketing, new institutional economics, policy, research, sharecropping, technology, transport.

Selected publications

(forthcoming) ‘Envisioning Futures of African Agriculture: Power, Representation, and Socially Constituted Time,’ Progress in Development Studies.

(2005) Special Issue: New Directions for African Agriculture, IDS Bulletin 36 (2), co-edited with Ian Scoones, Stephen Devereux, and Lawrence Haddad.

(2005) ‘Transport, Poverty, and Agrarian Change in Africa: Models, Mechanisms and New Ways Forward,’ IDS Bulletin 36 (2): 52-57.

(2004) Mozambique - Food Security Options, London: Overseas Development Institute, Forum for Food Security in Southern Africa, with Steve Wiggins.

(2003) ‘(Mis)Understanding Change in Agro-Environmental Technology in Africa: Charting and Refuting the Myth of Population-Induced Breakdown,’ in T. Zeleza and I. Kakoma (eds), In Search of Modernity: Science and Technology in Africa, Trenton: Africa World Press, 473-505.

(2003) ‘Constructing Subsidiarity, Consolidating Hegemony: Political Economy and Agro-Ecological Processes in Ghanaian Forestry,’ Environmental Governance in Africa Working Paper No. 13, Washington, DC: World Resources Institute.

Personal interests

Biking, Cooking, Gardening, Music, Reading, Surfing

Websites of interest

www.allafrica.com
www.live365.com
www.africaaction.org
www.donorplatform.org

Contact information

adegrassi@berkeley.edu