Endogenous innovation and change: community agency in two case studies in Ghana

Agricultural innovations have often been framed within a narrow, modernist narrative of technological modernisation and yield improvements – economic targets that often do not take the needs and knowledges of local communities into account. We therefore propose to re-define the term as ‘endogenous innovation’ to emphasise community agency and epistemic empowerment, in analogy with endogenous development processes. We analyse case studies in Ghana in the Upper East and Bono East region, where we find empirical examples of endogenous innovations in the making. These require endogenous infrastructure that create decision-making spaces for farmers, mediators who bridge diverse knowledges, and epistemic justice. The notion of endogenous innovation therefore disrupts the vision of who counts as an ‘innovator’ in innovation processes by highlighting the epistemic agency of communities and opens up new ways of thinking about change that is more aligned with the needs and perspectives of local communities.