This year it’s 25 years since Zimbabwe’s controversial land reform. Ever since the year 2000 when people invaded the land and former white farmers were dispossessed of their farms, we have been tracking what has happened. We have been asking a very simple question: what happened to livelihoods once people got land?
This year is therefore a moment to reflect on this process over a quarter of a century. This is important for Zimbabwe, as the country looks forward to economic regeneration with land and farming central, but also more generally as other countries in the region, notably South Africa, grapple with land reform and more widely as debates about the roles of agrarian reform in galvanising growth through increasing equity via land redistribution.
Our ‘25 years after Zimbabwe’s land reform’ project kicks off this year with explorations of the processes of change in our three core sites: Mvurwi, Masvingo/Gutu and Matobo. These offer contrasting settings with which to ask questions about change over time. Across these sites we have been working with around 1000 households across A1, A2 and some comparator communal area sites (now increased by new entrants, subdivisions and so on).
We have mix of data, including surveys from various points since the early 2000s to biographies of particular individuals and households to farm surveys and crop assessments and wider evaluations of themes such as technology change, markets, the role of youth, gender relations and economic linkages to small towns. Much of this has been reported before on our blog, including some reflections on 20 years after land reform five years ago, as well as a major compilation of our journal articles in a book, alongside a review of key findings (available here and here). This body of work – alongside that from many others – has already helped shape the debate, which is now increasingly nuanced and informed (although not always!). However, the longitudinal assessment adds to this in important ways, offering insights into longer term patterns and trajectories of change.
Longitudinal analyses are notoriously difficult. People move, households split, generations change and there are always new themes to explore. We never intended to set up a formal ‘panel’ survey where the same households/individuals are tracked over time, as we didn’t have the intention to continue for so long and certainly didn’t have the resources. We are relying instead on a bricolage of data elements that can be pieced together to offer a bigger picture. The good news is that, through our approach of engaged research, rooted in the different field sites, we have a very good idea of what has happened. We know nearly all the households personally, so tracing people and tracking processes is feasible.
This year we will conduct a survey across our full sample making use of the core questionnaire that has been used over time. We will be adding a few more questions as new themes have emerged, but we will aim to collect data on the basic changes in demography, asset ownership, income sources and so on as we have over time. The big job will be to compile this new data with the past data sources to offer a longitudinal picture. Quantitative data of this sort is useful for certain questions (how much/many? etc.), but less so for understanding processes of change – and the emotional, social, political dynamics that this entails. To get a sense of this we are continuing to conduct biographies of individuals and households (a sub-sample of the full sample), exploring their own personal experiences of changes since 2000. These are immensely revealing and an ideal complement to the survey data on the bigger full sample.
After 25 years much has changed. People have grown older, become ill, died, been born, grown up, got married, moved locations and so on. So, capturing these changes is essential. Equally important is understanding how wider contexts have shifted – political, economic, environmental – which together shape trajectories of change in important ways. The sample and study site contexts of course look very different compared to 2000. The jambanja period in 2000 saw people largely from communal areas and some from towns invading what became the A1 smallholder areas. They were in their 30s and early 40s, some with young children, many without. They were the ones who could cope with the harsh and political volatile moment that land invasions entailed. There were men and women who came, and indeed many single, separated/divorced women.
Twenty-five years later, the same people are in their 50s and 60s, children are older and more plentiful and some of the original settlers have passed on. And at the same time, people have experienced periods of hyperinflation, multiple currency changes, a coup and a change of political regime, contested elections and shifts in representation, alongside periods of drought, deforestation, diseases affecting cattle (January disease) and humans (COVID-19) and much more.
Consequently, we have been looking at the generational shifts that have occurred in our sample and how new generations have fared, gained land and established themselves. We are also looking at how this has changed production systems – with young people adopting small-scale irrigation for example on smaller plots – as well as patterns of social reproduction and changing gender roles as demands for caring and support change over time, as children grow up and parents age. And in parallel we have been tracking how wider political economy and environmental contexts have changed, both in general at a national level and specifically within our sites.
Overall, through the curation of diverse sources of data, we aim to get a better understanding of how gaining access to land made a difference both for A1 (smallholders) and A2 (medium-scale farms) settlers, and whether the livelihood trajectories and patterns of accumulation were similar or different across sites with different agroecological conditions and crop/livestock mixes and between those in the new resettlement areas and the communal areas from where many people came. We are also interested to learn more about how land reform has created opportunities for economic linkages and wider economic growth in small towns and along value chains, and we will continue to work in Mvurwi, Chatsworth and Maphisa investigating what difference the changing post-land reform economic geography makes. This is exciting and hopefully useful work. We are already engaging with many in government, donor agencies, embassies and NGOs in Zimbabwe sharing our findings. The research will involve a lot of work from the full team, both based in the field sites and working across them. Watch this space for more updates on progress of the research as it unfolds across the next year.
This blog was written by Ian Scoones and first appeared on Zimbabweland