The Façade of Pluralization in Africa’s Agriculture Extension Innovation Ecosystems

The spread of agri-tech innovations in agricultural extension has involved a political-economy restructuring of the agrarian domain. However, its reorganization of state–society relations, along with its implications for pro-poor development, remains underexplored. This article teases out the reorganization of the extension architecture, shedding light on emerging patterns and trade-offs. It uses a socio-technical innovation systems lens, combined with the critical political economy of agrarian change. Through thematic synthesis of qualitative data from expert interviews, focus groups, and company reports, the article produces a typology of five emerging models through which extension’s form, function, and substance have shifted, resulting in the restructuring of access, expectations, roles, and relative agency. This article argues that the restructuring of the extension landscape is producing a social contract characterized by a managerial rather than a deliberative logic in the renegotiation of state–society relations, the erosion of unconditional citizenship-based rights, and the simultaneous strengthening and weakening of the state. As such, the unfolding technological transformation is producing an underlying transition from a nominally unconditional agrarian social contract to a stratified, limited-access order. Its commercializability imperative determines access, agency, and the distribution of value between users with varying economic profiles and the custodians of digital infrastructures, producing path dependence that dampens the pro-poor transformation.