I appreciate the GSSC for being a platform of exchange and inspiration, but also challenge. The GSSC conveniently allows people to step out of the narrow containers of their discipline and get involved with people with totally different backgrounds and practices of doing academic work. This stepping-out is on the one side exciting and very inspiring. It shapes empirical and conceptual understandings in a way that is not possible in the enclaves of some institutes. On the other side, the diverse audience at the GSSC makes it an interesting challenge to present and justify my own contributions. I see the constructive negotiation for the legitimacy of my work in front of other GSSC scholars as extremely important and that is why I am grateful to have many formal and informal ways of doing that at the GSSC office.

Growth corridors are instruments to territorialize powerful visions and imaginations of inclusive regional development for peripheral, rural regions in the Global South. Especially, the latest generation of growth corridors with particular focus on the modernization of agricultural production systems comes with the promise of establishing a platform to govern and plan development interventions and negotiate the manifold interests of local population and businesses, national governments, international donors, and foreign investors.

Drawing from extensive conceptual debates on value chain development and the subsequent appropriation of the value chain toolkit as a “third way” in transforming agrarian spaces, complex assemblages of corridor stakeholders have “touched ground” in recent years.

In order to epitomize this trend, we draw from two case studies, the Walvis Bay-Ndola-Lubumbashi Development Corridor (WBNLDC) in Namibia and the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT). Our goal is to understand how different actors along made or yet to be made agro-chains engage in envisioning, shaping and enforcing the implementation of the corridors and what the intended and unintended consequences of such engagements are. Therefore, we focus on the socio-spatial manifestations of corridor-related value chain activities in both case study regions. Changing land uses, emerging and dissolving relational networks between stakeholders as well as practices of producers, traders, and intermediaries aggregate our empirical access to this research.