Enduring Contestations: Stakeholder Strategic Action in Water Resource Management in the Save Catchment Area, Eastern Zimbabwe

Abstract

A number of Southern African countries, including Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe, embarked on water reform processes in the 1990s and identified stakeholder participation as a critical component towards achieving sustainable water resource management. This article examines attempts at institutionalising stakeholder participation in Zimbabwe, which has made significant strides in this regard. The enactment of the Water Act by the Government of Zimbabwe in 1998 broadened stakeholder participation in water resource management. For the first time, indigenous smallholder farmers were also made stakeholders, a right that had been enjoyed by a few white large-scale commercial farmers. This article examines the strategic actions employed by different stakeholder groups in water resource management under the new dispensation. Strategic analyses, using Long's (1992) actor-oriented approach, illustrate that the strategies of the stakeholders form part of a wider contestation over productive resources in Zimbabwe between different groups of people. The contestations in the water sector have shifted from the legal domain and assumed more subtle forms of contestations in the mould of "consultation" and "participation", the new buzz words of liberal democracy, which have been readily used as legitimising symbols by some powerful stakeholders. However, the less powerful stakeholders have also weapons to fight back. Such an analysis can shed light on the ramifications of contestations deployed in the quest for control of resources better than social learning and communicative rationality theoretical perspectives. The data presented in this article was collected in the Save Catchment Council area in the eastern part of Zimbabwe between August 2001 and April 2002.


Eastern Africa Social Science Research Review Vol.XX(1) 2004: 67-92