This thesis seeks to understand the basis of the enduring under-performing
agriculture-led development strategy, and the paucity of innovation and
reflexivity in matters of socio-economic change in Malawi. Situated in the
qualitative research tradition, the study seeks to examine social meaning, its
construction and consumption in Malawi's community/national development
strategy. The study proceeds in this quest to examine representations of
development in discourse in Malawi's two contrasting pollitical cultures,
namely, the repressive single party era of Dr Banda and his Malawi Congress
Party Government, and the democratic era marked by the onset of political
pluralism in 1994, and stretches from Malawi's independence in 1964 to the
first term of Malawi's democratic governance in 1998.