Neoliberalism, regime rurvival, and the environment: economic reform and agricultural transformation in Zimbabwe in the 1990s

Economic reform in Zimbabwe under the auspices of the Bank World Bank and IMF began in 1991. The first phase of program, called structural economic adjustment program (ESAP ) lasted from 1991 to 1996. The second phase, the Transformation Agenda social and economic development of Zimbabwe (ZIMPREST) should go until at least 2002. Much of the debate about the performance of reform in Zimbabwe revolves around three main actors: Government of Zimbabwe ( GOZ ) , international financial institutions (IFIs) and the environment, particularly droughts 1991-92. This paper contributes to a broader discussion on the reform Economic Zimbabwe in three ways : first, by describing the outline of its economy, chronologically and structurally politically , the second , by assessing its impact on production agricultural , and the third , evaluating its impact on security food of a neglected set of actors, the urban poor . The article concludes that agricultural reform failed to reallocate productive resources , to reorganize the spatial distribution of production and increase access various social classes to food. Moreover, this failure can be attributed to a combination of factors including the post- colonial political economy dynamics orchestrated by ZANU (PF) is not reduced. [Note: translated from French

Beyond the ‘Posts’ in African Development Discourse: Exploring Real Solutions to Africa’s Problems

This special issue attempts to further a line of critical inquiry in African politics, administration and development discourse, which we refer to here as the ‘posts’. In our terminology, the ‘posts’ constitute a body of narratives, which critique the heterogeneous assortment of orthodoxies in the mainstream African development discourse. The ‘posts’, although part of the mainstream thinking, interrogate themes within that discourse for their disingenuous intellectual and policy approaches to African problems (see Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999 for a general discussion of the subject). The ‘posts’ charge that mainstream discourses, far from being beacons of enlightenment about Africa, often reflect a broad intellectual inertia, manifested in failed policies to address poverty-alleviation, the region’s main development challenge.This manuscript is an article from Progress in Development Studies 12(2&3) 2012: 93-98. doi: 10.1177/146499341101200301. Posted with permission.</p