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This dissertation explores the complexities of agrarian change in Rwanda through the lens of land use consolidation (LUC), one ‘modernization’ policy among many that the Government of Rwanda (GoR) has relied on in an attempt to reorient rural communities and landscapes away from localized, subsistence economies and toward national development goals. As the policy has expanded over the past decade, the patchwork landscape of small, mixed-cropped plots has, in the most ‘successful’ LUC areas, been transformed into homogenous stretches of a handful of market-oriented crops. As the agrarian landscape has changed, so too have many of the communal practices and that once defined life in rural Rwanda. Focusing on three sites in Gatsibo District, located in eastern Rwanda, my research attempts to understand how farming communities navigate rapid socio-environmental change, the role of the Rwandan state in shaping agrarian landscapes and futures, and how the LUC policy is materially and discursively enacted through local leaders. This research, primarily conducted from November 2019 through June 2020, draws on interviews with farmers and GoR officials, focus group discussions with rural communities, Rwanda’s oral poetic tradition, and the materials, discourses, and tools that shape LUC and agrarian life. My research focuses on processes of alienation and commodification that, while generating income, have also resulted in a loss of communal ritual, poetics, and social cohesion, producing for many people an ambivalent mixture of nostalgia and hope regarding agrarian change. I elaborate on the ways in which the GoR mobilizes ‘good governance’ discourse and appropriates ‘cultural traditions’ to legitimize policies such as LUC in an attempt to maintain state cohesion. Finally, I focus on the role of local leaders as intermediaries who attempt to enact an idealized state policy that rarely coheres with the messy reality of agrarian life in Gatsibo. I argue that the modes of knowledge production, tools, and crops that comprise LUC are simplifying regimes that actively degrade the social reproductive functions of agrarian labor and ritual, making it increasingly difficult for communities to address collective, localized problems. At the same time, people continue to dream about the future and the often-delayed promises of prosperity that ‘modernization’ is meant to deliver. My work demonstrates the uneven, often unexpected, outcomes resulting from top-down development policies, the heterogeneity of environmental governance within strong states, and the intimate, affective connection between agricultural practice, social reproduction, and environmental change.

http://dissertations.umi.com/gsnb.rutgers:12260

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-hm56-4d73

The author owns the copyright to this work.