Cotton is at the heart of efforts to boost development and alleviate poverty throughout much of rural Francophone Africa. This dissertation analyzes the impacts of the two most prominent cotton sector reforms—liberalization and the introduction of transgenic cotton—designed to improve cotton productivity and profitability in one Francophone African country, Burkina Faso. Chapter 2 explores the impacts of liberalization reforms on the ability of the Burkinabè state to control the cotton sector. The World Bank pushed Burkina Faso to share control of the state-run cotton company with a new cotton producers union as a means to boost cotton productivity. But this research shows that though the Burkinabè state ceded some control to the cotton producers union, it subverted the spirit of reforms by effectively co-opting the union, installing moderate leadership and silencing more radical grower movements. Chapter 3 examines the village- and household-level impacts of liberalization reforms along four interrelated themes: producer empowerment, community development, agricultural intensification and social differentiation. Liberalization reforms blunted efforts to empower producers and reduced the community benefits associated with cotton production. Liberalization reforms restructured village-level cotton cooperatives to improve management and boost productivity. But management issues persist and since the new cooperatives are organized by ethnic affiliation, they may contribute to growing ethnic divisions. Chapter 4 analyzes the introduction of transgenic cotton in Burkina Faso. A suite of agro-ecological and institutional factors mediates the performance of transgenic cotton for producers. Because of the high price of Bt cottonseed, and the high debts producers must incur, transgenic cotton is likely to primarily benefit the relatively wealthy and only in the short term under average growing conditions. Since elite cotton sector actors have strong interests behind the introduction of transgenic cotton there may not be a proper and rigorous evaluation of who benefits most from its introduction. Together liberalization and the introduction of transgenic cotton reduce the benefits of cotton production for the relatively poor. Moreover, this research demonstrates that greater cotton productivity may lie less in the technologies available to producers than in the awareness that politics and governance shape producers' desire to increase production.