On 26 October 2023, Benedict Yiyugsah will defend his thesis exploring the extent to which Ghana and Zambia have been able (or not) to secure and exercise agency with respect to their broader struggles for development policy autonomy vis–à–vis external pressures. His research focuses on the question: why are cash transfers more susceptible to external influences than agricultural input price subsidies? He challenges the seeming twin consensus in the literature that has largely held up the rise of Ghana’s LEAP and Zambia’s unified SCTs as the strong example of the primacy of domestic politics as well as soft forms of external influences. Instead, he attributes their rise to the primacy of 'hard', yet discreet, forms of external influences, which were exercized within the context of a new structure of liberal aid governmentality. He discusses the co-optive measures by which both countries internalized external agents' mentality through a complex process of change that further involved the use of complementary institutional dimensions such as donors' administrative methods of surveillance and monitoring, that governed the practices of aid delivery.

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