I look out through the open car window over the wide, flat grasslands of northern Tanzania, home to Barabaig pastoralists and smallholder farmers. We have stopped to make way for cattle crossing the dirt road, herded by a young Barabaig boy. As we continue north, we see the area with scattered sheds and houses where I have been doing my research. A dala-dala (public-service minibus) overtakes us. It is overloaded with people and goods from Bagamoyo town and Dar es Salaam, two hours’ drive to the south.

We are driving through the investment project site, the area where 20,374 ha of land were selected for investment by a Swedish investor in 2006, through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Tanzanian government. In 2013, the company was provided with its Right of Occupancy, a 99-year lease, to develop 7,700 ha of sugar cane and a processing plant. Promises were made to produce hundreds of thousands of tonnes of sugar, millions of litres of ethanol and electricity for the national grid, as well as providing the state with US$30 million in yearly tax revenues, creating 12,000–15,000 jobs and contributing at least US$10 million per year to the local communities. Resettlement was to take place in line with international best practice.

Yet, more than a decade after the MoU was signed, no sugar cane was planted. None of the residents had been resettled. Instead, people waited for many years, with increasing uncertainty about when and where to move, how to plan their agricultural production, and what the rate of compensation would be. The result of the delayed development was deteriorating livelihoods.

Since the food, fuel and financial crises of 2007–08, huge attention has been paid to the rush for land for large-scale agricultural investment in Africa. Yet many of these investments never got beyond the plans, and others are stalled or have failed to materialise (Hall et al. 2015b). Tanzania is no exception to this pattern of failure (Abdallah et al. 2014). In this chapter, I contribute to our understanding of why such failures happen, drawing on the case of a planned sugar-cane project in Bagamoyo district.

In particular, I explore how simplifications in project design interact with the complex implementation context to produce repeated delays and, ultimately, the project’s failure to materialise.