The Making Vegetable Markets Work (MVMW) Program, funded by the Livelihoods and Food Security Trust Fund (LIFT), is a three-year initiative that aims to increase incomes for smallholder vegetable farmers and improve the functioning and inclusivity of the larger market system. Using a market development approach, MVMW seeks to facilitate improvement in the functioning of the entire market system and along the entire value chain. MVMW works from the farm level up to national policy level, strengthening the vegetable market, enabling environmentand supporting markets in financial services and agricultural inputs. All too often, development programs rely on transplanting “best practices” from one environment to another, relying on assumptions aboutthe problems and solutions, past experience or a quick scan of the market in question. When working on markets, interventions can be designed in a ‘market vacuum’ that fail to understand the relationships, power and politics that affect them. MVMW was keen to address this. The program has committed to conduct a series of ‘Conflict Governance and Markets Assessments’ (CGMA) using political economy analysis to provide a nuanced, contextual understanding of the vegetable market system.