Send for the cavalry: Political incentives in the provision of agricultural advisory services

This article examines how political incentives shape the implementation of agricultural advisory service reforms. Using the Uganda experience as a typical case we find that elections incentivized the Government to add a subsidized input component to the existing service. Growing pressures from local politicians, the Ministry of Agriculture and increasingly disgruntled army factions then constituted a strong and interlocking set of further incentives to revert to a recentralized, top‐down model dominated by the new, subsidized input component. Our findings point to how well designed implementation processes can be disrupted by the changing incentive structure, an insight which calls for more patient and much more pragmatic approaches to adopting “trial and error” models rather than more ambitious, but perhaps unrealistic, options.