From Jambanja to Planning: The Reassertion of Technology in Land Reform in South-Eastern Zimbabwe?

Chaumba, Joseph; Scoones, Ian; Wolmer, William

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Title:	From Jambanja to Planning: The Reassertion of Technology in Land Reform in South-Eastern Zimbabwe?
Authors:	Chaumba, Joseph Scoones, Ian Wolmer, William
Year:	2003
Periodical:	Journal of Modern African Studies
Volume:	41
Issue:	4
Period:	December
Pages:	533-554
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Zimbabwe
Subjects:	land reform Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment Politics and Government Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) Development and Technology
External link:	https://www.jstor.org/stable/3876353
Abstract:	This paper examines the land occupations and fast-track resettlement process in Chiredzi district in Zimbabwe's southeast lowveld, and argues that their broad-brush representation as chaotic, violent and unplanned is misleading. In Zimbabwe the instruments and mechanisms of order assert themselves even in the midst of violent disorder. The ongoing deployment of the formal and technical tools and discourses of land-use planning have been instrumental in securing the visibility and legitimacy of Zimbabwe's new settlers. The speed and short cuts of the fast-track land reform process and vagueness of policies to date have in the short term opened up a certain amount of space for negotiation and a degree of leeway and flexibility in land-use planning and allocation. But the danger for the settlers is that, by deploying a discourse rooted in long-held and institutionally embedded Rhodesian traditions of planning and control, they have played into a process that - as so often in Zimbabwe's history - will reimpose coercive land-use regulations that are at odds with their livelihood strategies and seek to vet settlers and so undermine populist claims of redressing inequalities and providing land to the landless and poor. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]