Introduction
Growth corridors are currently among the most popular spatial-development initiatives of future-making in Africa. It is expected that growth corridors will enable mobilization of private and public stakeholders to create a critical mass of investment, and this goes hand in hand with a promise of modernity and economic growth (Gálvez Nogales and Webber 2017). Though growth corridors are imagined as game-changers, scholars increasingly criticize a gap between vision and reality, as well as the general underpinnings of corridor paradigms. Future-making through corridors often occurs under power imbalances and unequal participation possibilities. It can ultimately drive processes that create uneven spatial outcomes (Chome et al. 2020).
Based on case studies of the Walvis Bay-Ndola-Lubumbashi Development Corridor (WBNLDC) and the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT), this contribution contrasts the vision and reality of both corridors by focusing on two particular value chains in agriculture and tourism. The results presented summarize the research work of the project ‘Futures in Chains: Socio-economic impacts of growth corridors’ within the framework of the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Future Rural Africa’, which was funded by the German Research Foundation. A mix of methods was used, including expert interviews, focus group discussions, and the analysis of household surveys. More detailed information on the methods used can be found, for example, in Kalvelage et al. (2021, 2022, 2023), Hartmann et al. (2021), Hulke et al. (2020), and Hulke and Revilla Diez (2022).
Our results show that both tangible (e.g. roads, railways, bridges) and more tacit (e.g. flow of finance) corridor features have affected everyday economic practices as they take shape and materialize in specific spaces and along specific value chains. Nevertheless, for both corridor initiatives, a lack of (visible) implementation as well as a selectiveness that favours only a few value chains and chain actors is an existential challenge that threatens their political, social, and economic legibility. We begin by outlining imaginaries of corridor-making and their expected benefits in the African context. With regard to our two case studies, we then reflect on these expectations from a value-chain perspective. Ultimately, the tension between the vision and the reality of corridors is addressed, which helps to understand where and for whom corridors unfold. It is therefore crucial to consider the actors that were involved in the making of the corridors and to question how corridor imaginaries are materialized, who benefits, and who remains excluded. In short, this chapter offers a critical analysis of how growth corridors function in practice, contrasting ambitious development visions with the grounded experiences of local actors. By examining agricultural and tourism value chains, it highlights both the transformative potential and the exclusionary tendencies of corridor development. The findings underscore the importance of unpacking the political economies and spatial selectivities that shape who gains and who loses in the making of Africa’s development futures.