Rise in resident associational life in response to service delivery decline by urban councils in Zimbabwe

This article links the decline of service delivery in urban councils in post-independence Zimbabwe to a rise in levels of associational life. Poorer urban residents cannot easily escape poor public sector service delivery by resorting to the private market. In response to declining service delivery by councils, ratepayers form residents’ associations to do three main things. First, they confront councils and pressure them to restore delivery capability. Second, they produce those services that councils are unable or unwilling to provide. Third, they defend residents against the predatory actions of councils. However, the capacities of residents’ associations in these three areas have yet to be established. Notably, limited formal opportunities exist for engagement between councils and residents’ associations which restricts their effectiveness. This paper argues that, if supported, residents’ associations can deepen local democracy while simultaneously facilitating the repair of councils’ capabilities – thus meeting disparate community demands and organising members to contribute to council recovery

Opportunities and challenges in institutionalising participatory development: The case of rural Zimbabwe.

This study explores opportunities and challenges for institutionalising participatory development in rural Zimbabwe and compares them with Zambia's experiences. It defines participatory development in terms of ordinary people's relations with the variety of organisations involved in development. The study finds that the main factors facilitating participatory development relate to inter-organisational interactions and the coordination of development activities. The interactions occur in joint and separate institutional spaces as organisations facilitate development. Initiators, regulators and participants of the interactions are many, formal and informal, local and external. Governments influence and participate in the interactions through policy formulation and direct implementation of programme activities but generally under-fund local governance institutions. Such Government involvement strengthens but also distorts local relations. Distortion is increasingly the situation in Zimbabwe. The study also finds that people's participation constitutes the bottom-up influence needed to make organisational interaction locally meaningful. The crisis in Zimbabwe has put a strain on organisational relations and capabilities to facilitate participatory development. Decentralisation theory does not hold much promise for Zimbabwe considering that there is little left to transfer and governance structures already exist. What remains is for local governance institutions to strengthen horizontal relationships, positively constrain political parties and allow definition and pursuit of development based more on local than external material resources. Such a development ethos does not preclude the importance of external support. In development theory, the thesis' concerns lie between policy and legislative issues on one hand and participatory appraisal methods and actual development activities on the other. I suggest that this area has been given limited attention despite being the 'Pandora's Box' in participatory development. While primarily based on Zimbabwe with some comparative analysis of Zambian experiences, the conclusions of this thesis are arguably applicable to many situations even where poverty and institutional stress are lower

Whose land is it anyway? : a rationalization of and proposal for a devolved institutional structure for land administration in Zimbabwe

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Evaluation of the Livestock Fairs Intervention Project in Zimbabwe

Oxfam GB implemented the Livestock Fairs project in Zimbabwe's Midlands and Masvingo provinces from 2004 to 2007. Targeting chronically poor people (unconditional voucher) and transitorily poor people (voucher in return for community works), the project enabled men and women to engage in public works programmes identified by their communities. This final evaluation assesses effectiveness (targeting, the ability of livestock fairs to address the livelihoods needs of poor people, and the extent to which community participation has been promoted) as well as impact (benefits to recipients and sellers of livestock, and the sustainability of livestock fairs)

Partisan citizenship and its discontents: precarious possession and political agency on Harare City’s expanding margins

On the margins of Zimbabwe’s expanding capital Harare, the ruling ZANU–PF party promotes a view of access to urban land, housing and security as ‘gift’, conditional on demonstrations of party loyalty. This article discusses contestation over this form of partisan citizenship, making the following broader arguments. First, it argues that the notion of partisan citizenship draws attention to the role of party political affiliation as a source of differential entitlements in illiberal democracies, countering a tendency to emphasise ethno-regional, racialized or religious communal identities as the primary sources of graduated citizenship in Africa. Second, it casts clientelist subjection as a contextual and contentious domain of ideas and action, rather than presenting it as cultural persistence or reducing it solely to material bargaining. Third, the article uses the Zimbabwean case to caution against a tendency within debates over southern urbanism to celebrate land occupations and informal construction as political resistance and route to full citizenship. In these ways, the article offers partisan citizenship as a means of taking forward debates over re-configurations of citizenship in Africa’s illiberal democracies and the politics of precarious peripheries in the urbanising global South more broadly