Stakeholder Perspectives on Internalizing Externalities in a Commercializing Groundnut Value Chain: Evidence from Malawi

A growing body of research is identifying and quantifying environmental, health and social externalities in agrifood systems and proposing measures to address these. However, relatively little empirical attention has been given to the factors that influence stakeholders’ willingness to adopt and implement such measures in practice. This exploratory qualitative study addresses this gap between identifying externalities and understanding what drives and constrains stakeholder adoption of internalization measures in Malawi’s commercializing groundnut value chain. Groundnut are commonly perceived as environmentally beneficial because of their low-input production requirements and nitrogen-fixing properties. However, commercialization can create new externalities and responsibilities and willingness to act depends partly on how these responsibilities are distributed across the value chain. Stakeholders’ stated willingness to adopt internalization measures was shaped by expected economic benefits, implementation costs, resource availability, value-chain position and the institutional conditions supporting adoption. Although multiple measures were identified to address the related externalities, willingness to adopt the practices depended on how implementation responsibilities, costs and benefits were distributed among actors, as well as on institutions’ ability to coordinate collective action across the value chain. The findings suggest that willingness to address environmental, health and social externalities is shaped by many of the same factors that drive adoption of new agricultural technologies and practices more generally. Although grounded in Malawi’s groundnut value chain, these findings have broader relevance for discussions on food-system transformation, sustainability transitions and the internalization of environmental, health and social externalities. Stakeholder perspectives should form a central component of food-system transformation planning, sustainability policy design and externality-internalization strategies. Without understanding who is willing to act, under what conditions and why, even technically effective interventions may struggle to achieve meaningful implementation or impact.