Land is central to contemporary debates about politics as anyone in Zimbabwe knows well. Land sustains the livelihoods of millions through farming, livestock keeping, hunting and collecting. Such livelihoods are intimately bound up with nature, and the complex and diverse ecosystems that thrive on land. Land creates a sense of identity refracted through gender, race, class and other axes of difference.

La tierra es fundamental para los debates contemporáneos sobre política. La tierra sostiene los medios de subsistencia de millones de personas a través de la agricultura, la ganadería, la caza y la re...

Next week several hundred participants from across the world will gather in Cape Town for a global conversation about the politics of land and resource struggles at the Land, Life and Society conference. The event is hosted by the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape and is co-hosted by IDS through the…

The Land Redistribution Initiative, co-led by Ian Scoones, will present experiences of redistributive land reform from across the world

I recently discussed my book, Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World, now a year old, with the New Books Network podcast. The host was Morteza Hajizadeh who asked a set of great questions over an extended discussion. We discussed many of the chapters, including the how bankers can learn from livestock traders in Africa; how lessons from local responses to the COVID-19 pandemic can inform us about preparing for disasters; how risk models can potentially undermine how we respond to uncertain conditions; how technology regulation needs to take into account how people understand innovations; how reliability professionals and their networks are important in responding to crises and disasters; and how to connect lived experiences of living with uncertainty with climate policies.

Zimbabwe’s national statistical agency, ZimStat, recently reported that 76% of the national economy is informal. This should be of no surprise to anyone, but what to do about it is the big question troubling policymakers. We know the causes: failure to invest in the core economy, lack of external financing, mountains of inherited regulation and poor economic governance. But is the solution to try and tax and ban the informal economy or work with it, avoiding unnecessary distortions and disincentives?

Since 2016, January disease (theileriosis) has decimated more than half a million cattle in many rural parts of Zimbabwe. Nearly all our study sites have been affected by the disease, with the exception of Matobo, where the climate is much drier and therefore ticks are less prolific than in the relatively wetter areas. For many, the impacts have been really severe, with whole herds wiped out reducing the ability to plough, supply manure and get milk for the family.

As part of our ongoing research on Zimbabwe’s land reform after 25 years, we have been exploring what is meant by ‘home’ and ‘belonging’. Across around 100 interviews undertaken in all our sites, we have asked two simple questions. Firstly, ‘where is ‘home’?’ Second, we asked where will you be buried when you die? Answers to these questions were varied, and often depended with property rights, local politics, proximity to town and so on.

Most of the huge ranches that took up much of Matobo district outside the crowded communal areas to the north were divided up during land reform. As in other areas there were medium-scale farms (A2 and so-called self-contained (SC)), aimed at commercial livestock production, themselves often quite large (ranging from 281 to 2000 ha) and A1 small-scale areas where mixed crop and livestock production was encouraged.

Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World, A bold call to embrace and learn from living in increasingly uncertain times

Our Masvingo province A1 sites – Wondedzo and Sanangwe near Masvingo town and Clare and Lonely A near Chatsworth in Gutu – are classic dryland maize growing areas. In good years, many tonnes of surplus are produced for sale or storage, and these moments provide the spur to invest and accumulate. The years after land redistribution saw some excellent harvests and once people had cleared land, they profited from large outputs.

Mvurwi area is in Mazowe district, some 100km north of Harare. It is a high potential area where tobacco production has expanded dramatically since land reform thanks in large part to the support from multiple contracting companies operating in the area. This was traditionally a tobacco growing area when large-scale farms dominated, combined with livestock keeping and some horticulture and orchards.

A central question for our new research exploring changes in livelihoods 25 years after land reform is what are the trajectories of accumulation – or indeed the opposite? In other words, how well have those who got land following the land reform of 2000 fared? The farmers occupying the small- and medium-scale farms (A1 and A2 respectively) from 2000 are not typical ‘subsistence peasants’ but are firmly linked into the wider capitalist market economy, accumulating and investing in their farms as well as off-farm businesses.

This blog offers a compilation of blogs published over the past weeks, which have offered a reflection on how local people understand 'success' and its changes over time especially in the period since the 2000 land reform. We have worked in a diversity of A1 smallholder land reform and communal area sites across the country and carried out multiple 'success ranking' workshops involving several hundred people, both men and women, young and older.

The previous blog series explored ‘success’ in A1 areas across our sites in Mazowe, Gutu, Masvingo and Matobo districts. How does this compare with local perceptions of success in communal areas? This is an important question as most people in A1 areas came originally from communal areas. The land reform was supposed to provide a positive alternative to the land scarcity and poverty so prevalent in the former ‘reserves’.

There are many different versions of ‘success’ in Zimbabwe’s A1 land reform areas as we found out across 11 different ‘success ranking’ exercises in our sites in Mazowe, Gutu, Masvingo and Matobo districts. A total of 208 people (113 men, 95 women) were involved in different workshops, and all proved lively and incredibly illuminating on the dynamics of change in land reform areas over 25 years.

Former farm workers living in compounds on resettlement farms in Mvurwi are some of the most marginalised people across the land reform farms. ‘Success’ is limited by a set of major structural constraints that individuals cannot overcome by themselves. We conducted success rankings in two farmworker compounds in Mvurwi – Hariana and Ruia D – involving 19 men and 23 women overall.

Villagised farms, with allocated homestead areas and fields and common grazing, are the most common type of land reform farm across the country, including in Masvingo province. We have three such case study sites - Lonely Farm (Gutu), Wondedzo Wares (Masvingo) and Sanangwe (Masvingo). Across these sites we discussed with a total of 52 people in three groups (4 men, 6 women; 9 men, 8 women and 15 men and 8 women respectively).

The challenges of managing generational change within farm households was highlighted by the A1 self-contained land reform sites in Masvingo province. Here we have two such sites – Clare farm in Gutu district and Wondedzo extension in Masvingo district. In these sites, people were allocated plots (around 30ha) to include homesteads, farmland and grazing in one area (more like a (very) small commercial farm, hence the likelihood that these will be reclassified as A2 areas soon).