Between Dispossession and Inclusion: Land Injustice and Project‐Based Citizenship in the Bagré Irrigation Scheme (Burkina Faso)

ABSTRACT Large‐scale irrigation schemes are central to agrarian transformation in sub‐Saharan Africa, yet their political implications are often reduced to questions of land redistribution or agrarian differentiation. Although existing scholarship has documented how irrigation restructures agrarian relations and generates dispossession, less attention has been paid to how successive development interventions reshape the institutional arenas through which grievances are formulated and political claims are articulated. Drawing on a longitudinal analysis of the Bagré irrigation scheme in Burkina Faso, combining interviews, archival sources and secondary literature, the article traces how successive phases of settlement, dam construction, resettlement and growth‐pole expansion reconfigured land governance over time. The analysis shows that irrigation development generated cumulative distributive, procedural and epistemic injustices that were progressively reorganized through the institutional devices of development projects, including compensation procedures, safeguard policies and grievance mechanisms. These devices did not eliminate conflicts but reshaped how grievances were formulated and addressed. As a result, political claims increasingly became directed towards project institutions rather than exclusively towards customary authorities or the state. The article conceptualizes this dynamic as the emergence of project‐based citizenship: a procedurally mediated and territorially bounded form of political belonging in which rights, obligations and claims are negotiated through development institutions.