In this chapter, I make a case for conceptualizing contract farming arrangements as institutions and for analyzing these contract farming systems within the Comparative Institutional Analysis (CIA) framework as proposed by Aoki (2001), characterizing contract farming as frictional equilibria. While the core of this proposed theoretical framework of contract farming is essentially neoinstitutionalist and centered on transactions costs, the Aokian framework helps accommodate both farmer-level phenomena as well as the contract farming domain, while also allowing for analysis of a scheme at a point of time and its evolution over time. This chapter argues that such an additive framework allows for the infusion of other disciplinary insights into economic research of contract farming.