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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Negotiating the state through inclusion in the community. Elite formation in decentralised resource management in Chimanimani, Mozambique
| Panel |
26. Decentralising power and natural resource control: responses and perspectives
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| Paper ID | 53 |
| Author(s) |
Tornimbeni, Corrado
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | After 15 years from the end of the internal war, the Frelimo government of Mozambique is trying to re-shape state-society relations through new policies. The new formal guiding principle is that of “decentralisation” of both political power and management of natural resources and land, for which there is international political and financial support. On the one side, the Mozambican institutions hope to re-gain the political control of many rural areas of the country where the institutions of the state has lost legitimacy. On the other side, the donor community envisages a support for grass-root decentralised policies on the natural resources of the country, in the belief that only kin-based “traditional” institutions can substitute “civil society” in improving the governance of the population in rural areas.
Based on a recent field-work inside the Trans-Frontier Conservation Area (TFCA) of Chimanimani in central Mozambique, this paper will show how the conservation project and the implementation of the land reform are contributing to strengthen a new local political elite linked to the institutions of the state. Furthermore, in the context of this process, the paper will argue that the people of the rural area under analysis are taking the initiative on their hands negotiating a new relationship with the modern state in Mozambique, which has to reconcile the need to strengthen both its structures and the efficacy of development planning with the need to deal with long standing characteristics of rural Mozambique, such as human mobility and migration. Rural authorities are making use of old and new instruments – community borders and pass-controls - to preserve for particular individuals or groups the advantages arising by the new policies of the state.
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