Cadastral politics: The making of community-based resource management in Zimbabwe and Mozambique

TR Number

Date

2001

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Institute of Social Studies

Abstract

Projects promoting community-based management of natural resources frequently encourage local smallholders to share flora, fauna, or land forms with state agencies and/or private companies. Ideals of common property and moral economy have inspired this agenda and helped spread it globally. In Southern Africa, however, the general model of shared landscapes has collided with a bitter history of white colonization and land grabbing. This article recounts the rise and fall of one CAMPFIRE (Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources) project in Eastern Zimbabwe. There, cadastral politics-struggles over bounding and control of land-overwhelmed negotiations for joint management and eco-tourism. Across the border, in Mozambique, community-based management has engaged with cadastral politics in a more fruitful fashion. In the midst of latter-day Afrikaner colonization, this project mapped smallholder's claims to land. Thus, the Zimbabwean project ignored territorial conflict and ultimately succumbed to it. The Mozambican project jumped into the fray, with some success. On past or current settler frontiers, community-based management may learn from this lesson: dispense with an ideology of sharing and join the rough-and -tumble of cadastral politics.

Description

Metadata only record

Keywords

Community management, Conflict, Ecotourism, Common property resources, Parks, Community participation, Natural resource management, Co-ownership, Land ownership, Projects, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Politics, Land, Communal areas management programme for indigenous resources (campfire), Resource management, Politics, Cadastres, Ecosystem Governance

Citation

Development and Change 32(4): 741-768