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The influence of succession on organisational sustainability has been widely acknowledged globally, but studies focusing specifically on farms remain relatively limited. This article examines the factors influencing succession in the newly occupied farms under the fast track land reform programme in Zimbabwe and their implications for the sustainability of the land reform programme. The study followed a qualitative multi-case research design. Data were collected using a combination of unstructured interviews, informal discussions, lived experience narrations and direct observations. Notwithstanding other structural and institutional constraints, the absence of succession arrangements and the politics of survival have been found to be the major threats to sustainability.

The scholarly discourse on migrants and land access in peri-urban spaces is advancing theoretically and empirically. This paper contributes to this important discourse by examining the structures a...

Internal migration is increasing within the African continent, but the processes by which migrants integrate and accumulate in the host community remain bewildering. Using ethnography as a method o...

This paper explores relationships among Zimbabwean irregular migrants trying to survive a rough informal settlement neighbourhood in Pretoria, South Africa. These migrants suffer some degree of ill...

This paper discusses strategies utilized by migrants/squatters in accessing land for settlement and livelihoods in places where the state and the indigenes are not sympathetic to their needs. Altho...

While debates about its morality continue among states and conservatives, migration is taking place in Africa. In previous decades, migration was dominated by men. Increasingly, in Zimbabwe, women are taking centre stage in this process. Using the case study of Chivi District in Zimbabwe which is now considered an established ‘donor’ of migrants, we examine how access and control of remittances by migrant men and women determines patrimony. This paper argues that migration and remittances have given birth to new rights and entitlements to daughters who were previously marginalised.

Global risks of zoonotic disease are high on policy agendas. Increasingly, Africa is seen as a ‘hotspot’, with likely disease spillovers from animals to humans. This paper explores the social dynamics of disease exposure, demonstrating how risks are not generalised, but are related to occupation, gender, class and other dimensions of social difference. Through case studies of Lassa Fever in Sierra Leone, Henipah virus in Ghana, Rift Valley Fever in Kenya and Trypanosomiasis in Zimbabwe, the paper proposes a social difference space–time framework to assist the understanding of and response to zoonotic diseases within a ‘One Health’ approach.

This chapter explores how people living on the edge of protected areas, and within transfrontier conservation areas (TFCAs), have been considered in the evolving literature on conservation and development. It focuses on different ecological perspectives that underpin conservationists' arguments to establish transfrontier parks (TFPs) and TFCAs. The central tenet in the perspectives, that larger areas can support a greater biodiversity, provides the ecological basis for conservationists' plans to enlarge and connect conservation areas. The notions of ecological integrity, intact ecosystems and ecosystem processes also have a bearing on these rationales in both scientific and public perceptions of TFCAs. The establishment of TFPs and linking corridors, together with the removal of fences in some areas, has also been seen as a means of solving conservation problems such as the expanding numbers of elephants in protected areas.

This article explores the implications for human health of local interactions between disease, ecosystems and livelihoods. Five interdisciplinary case studies addressed zoonotic diseases in African settings: Rift Valley fever (RVF) in Kenya, human African trypanosomiasis in Zambia and Zimbabwe, Lassa fever in Sierra Leone and henipaviruses in Ghana. Each explored how ecological changes and human–ecosystem interactions affect pathogen dynamics and hence the likelihood of zoonotic spillover and transmission, and how socially differentiated peoples’ interactions with ecosystems and animals affect their exposure to disease. Cross-case analysis highlights how these dynamics vary by ecosystem type, across a range from humid forest to semi-arid savannah; the significance of interacting temporal and spatial scales; and the importance of mosaic and patch dynamics. Ecosystem interactions and services central to different people's livelihoods and well-being include pastoralism and agro-pastoralism, commercial and subsistence crop farming, hunting, collecting food, fuelwood and medicines, and cultural practices. There are synergies, but also tensions and trade-offs, between ecosystem changes that benefit livelihoods and affect disease. Understanding these can inform ‘One Health’ approaches towards managing ecosystems in ways that reduce disease risks and burdens.This article is part of the themed issue ‘One Health for a changing world: zoonoses, ecosystems and human well-being’.

Zoonotic diseases will maintain a high level of public policy attention in the coming decades. From the spectre of a global pandemic to anxieties over agricultural change, urbanization, social inequality and threats to natural ecosystems, effectively preparing and responding to endemic and emerging diseases will require technological, institutional and social innovation. Much current discussion emphasizes the need for a ‘One Health’ approach: bridging disciplines and sectors to tackle these complex dynamics. However, as attention has increased, so too has an appreciation of the practical challenges in linking multi-disciplinary, multi-sectoral research with policy, action and impact. In this commentary paper, we reflect on these issues with particular reference to the African sub-continent. We structure the themes of our analysis on the existing literature, expert opinion and 11 interviews with leading One Health scholars and practitioners, conducted at an international symposium in 2016. We highlight a variety of challenges in research and knowledge production, in the difficult terrain of implementation and outreach, and in the politicized nature of decision-making and priority setting. We then turn our attention to a number of strategies that might help reconfigure current pathways and accepted norms of practice. These include: (i) challenging scientific expertise; (ii) strengthening national multi-sectoral coordination; (iii) building on what works; and (iv) re-framing policy narratives. We argue that bridging the research-policy-action interface in Africa, and better connecting zoonoses, ecosystems and well-being in the twenty-first century, will ultimately require greater attention to the democratization of science and public policy. This article is part of the themed issue ‘One Health for a changing world: zoonoses, ecosystems and human well-being’.

This paper argues that addressing the underlying structural drivers of disease vulnerability is essential for a ‘One Health’ approach to tackling zoonotic diseases in Africa. Through three case studies—trypanosomiasis in Zimbabwe, Ebola and Lassa fever in Sierra Leone and Rift Valley fever in Kenya—we show how political interests, commercial investments and conflict and securitization all generate patterns of vulnerability, reshaping the political ecology of disease landscapes, influencing traditional coping mechanisms and affecting health service provision and outbreak responses. A historical, political economy approach reveals patterns of ‘structural violence’ that reinforce inequalities and marginalization of certain groups, increasing disease risks. Addressing the politics of One Health requires analysing trade-offs and conflicts between interests and visions of the future. For all zoonotic diseases economic and political dimensions are ultimately critical and One Health approaches must engage with these factors, and not just end with an ‘anti-political’ focus on institutional and disciplinary collaboration.This article is part of the themed issue ‘One Health for a changing world: zoonoses, ecosystems and human well-being’.

Links to the interviews relating to this paper.

This review outlines the benefits of using multiple approaches to improve model design and facilitate multidisciplinary research into infectious diseases, as well as showing and proposing practical examples of effective integration. It looks particularly at the benefits of using participatory research in conjunction with traditional modelling methods to potentially improve disease research, control and management. Integrated approaches can lead to more realistic mathematical models which in turn can assist with making policy decisions that reduce disease and benefit local people. The emergence, risk, spread and control of diseases are affected by many complex bio-physical, environmental and socio-economic factors. These include climate and environmental change, land-use variation, changes in population and people’s behaviour. The evidence base for this scoping review comes from the work of a consortium, with the aim of integrating modelling approaches traditionally used in epidemiological, ecological and development research. A total of five examples of the impacts of participatory research on the choice of model structure are presented. Example 1 focused on using participatory research as a tool to structure a model. Example 2 looks at identifying the most relevant parameters of the system. Example 3 concentrates on identifying the most relevant regime of the system (e.g., temporal stability or otherwise), Example 4 examines the feedbacks from mathematical models to guide participatory research and Example 5 goes beyond the so-far described two-way interplay between participatory and mathematical approaches to look at the integration of multiple methods and frameworks. This scoping review describes examples of best practice in the use of participatory methods, illustrating their potential to overcome disciplinary hurdles and promote multidisciplinary collaboration, with the aim of making models and their predictions more useful for decision-making and policy formulation. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s40249-016-0110-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Multilingual abstracts in the six official working languages of the United Nations. (PDF 351 kb)

In wildlife management in developing countries, it is widely accepted that limiting the benefits of wildlife to 'producer communities' - those communities who share territory with wildlife - ensures conservation at the local level. In southern Africa, governments have taken on board this principle, and have organised their wildlife management programmes around it. This is the case with Zimbabwe's Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources or CAMPFIRE. Using a case study of CAMPFIRE, this article examines both the effects of concentrating benefits in producer communities, and of excluding outsiders from community-based natural resource management programmes. It argues that the monopoly on benefits held by the producer community serves to antagonise non-members and, in some cases, spurs them on to seek the destruction of what they may come to regard as a costly wildlife management programme.

There is in Africa, as in other parts of the third world, a desire for environmental management that simultaneously incorporates and benefits all stakeholders, including private businesses and villagers. While these partnerships continue to displace the failed state-centric management of the African landscape, research to document their local-level impact is still formative and developing. This article is an attempt to examine the new environmental management partnerships emerging in southern Africa's countryside. It argues that these new interventions not only fail to deliver benefits to villagers: more importantly, they curtail the long-established rights to land and other natural resources of indigenous communities. While villagers may engage in a battle to recover these rights, it is a struggle in which the odds are stacked against them, and which the private sector and its partners are set to win.

This paper present preliminary results from the MOOP household survey conducted in Zimbabwe in 2015. We provide a profile of migrants and of their households and also explore perceptions of the value of migration. Finally we provide an agenda for further research using our data. Two observations are worthy of further research. First is the finding that male migrants send more money home to their families than female migrants, which we suggest is due to differences in job opportunities available to migrant’s at their destination (skilled construction for men and domestic work for women). However this finding ignores the value of non-cash remittances, which we intend to explore in future work. We also find that households while generally positive about the value of migration to their living standards, are less positive in the context of international migration. We suggest this reflects recent events in South Africa, not least the devaluation of the Rand and an intensification of xenophobia.

This paper compares and contrasts emerging forms of social action in urban domestic water supply in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Both countries represent transitional societies that are facing challenges of providing clean and safe domestic water to the black majority population, which for decades was denied basic social services because of a racist ideology. In the first instance the paper assesses whether there exists a constitutional provision that guarantees the right to water. It then turns to how that is enforced, and what happens in its absence. Lastly the paper examines whether the various interventions lead to improved access to safe water. In South Africa an awareness of the constitutional right to water backed by a supportive legislative framework, which engendered a strong sense of entitlement, caused residents to resort to the courts and direct action such as street protests. Similar initiatives were also observed in Zimbabwe. However, the absence of a conducive legal environment, and disenchantment with the state as a provider of social services, led residents to resort to self reliance in order to access water. In both countries social action was not organic –it tended to be championed if not sponsored either by civil society or party political actors. There was no evidence of improved access to safe water as a consequence of social action. The paper concludes that social action in the urban domestic water supply faces the common challenges of social mobilization in particular and social movements in general.

Présentation de l'éditeur : The introduction of transfrontier conservation areas (TFCAs) in southern Africa was based on an enchanting promise: simultaneously contributing to global biodiversity conservation initiatives, regional peace and integration, and the sustainable socio-economic development of rural communities. Cross-border collaboration and eco-tourism became seen as the vehicles of this promise, which would enhance regional peace and stability along the way. However, as these highly political projects take shape, conservation and development policymaking progressively shifts from the national to regional and global arenas, and the peoples most affected by TFCA formation tend to disappear from view. This book focuses on the forgotten people displaced by, or living on the edge of, protected wildlife areas. It moves beyond the grand 'enchanting promise' of conservation and development across frontiers, and unfounded notions of TFCAs as integrated social-ecological systems. Peoples' dependency on natural resources - the specific combination of crop cultivation, livestock keeping and natural resource harvesting activities - varies enormously along the conservation frontier, as does their reliance on resources on the other side of the conservation boundary. Hence, the studies in this book move from the dream of eco-tourism-fuelled development supporting nature conservation and people towards the local realities facing marginalized people, living adjacent to protected areas in environments often poorly suited to agriculture. Contents: Foreword (Professor Marshall W. Murphree). 1. People at wildlife frontiers in Southern Africa. 2. TFCAs and the invisible peoples. 3. Defining the edge: boundary formation and TFCAs in Southern Africa. 4. Population and livelihoods on the edge. 5. Ethnic heterogeneity and its implications for natural resources management on the edge. 6. On the edge of state and economy. 7. Resource gradients and movements across the edge of transfrontier parks. 8. Consequences of animals crossing the edges of transfrontier parks. 9. Land and natural resource-based livelihood opportunities in transfrontier conservation areas. 10. Whither TFCAs and people on the edge in Southern Africa? Index

This paper investigates prospects for collective action in the provision and management of domestic water in Zimbabwean urban areas in the light of the deteriorating water situation. It interrogates the view that a collective of individuals in a community can be an important resource (social capital) that, together with appropriate institutional design, be harnessed for the good of the community. The paper uses Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, as a case study to test this assumption. Empirical data was collected from two low income suburbs that represented an established suburb and a new suburb that was being developed by a co-operative. In both suburbs collective action has been and continues to be attempted with regards to domestic water provision. The study was undertaken between February and December 2011. Key informants, focus group discussions and participant observation were used to study the dynamics of collection action. There was more evidence of collection action in the newer than in the established suburb. However, the collection action was experiencing problems. The paper discusses the reasons behind this observation. The paper concludes that while collective action seemed desirable and was being attempted, its operationalisation proved to be a challenge, which underlines the need to identify the conditions under which this may work. Understanding the physical and social context of social capital, as well as defining the role of the state, is critical if the benefits of collective action, in the form of sustainable water service outcomes for the residents, are to be realized.

Political crisis has been observed in Africa. States are unable to deliver on their promises of development and good governance. As a way of attempting to remain legitimate, states pursue populist agendas, which in short involves relaxing the rules and institutions which common property theorists have argued are necessary for effective natural resource management. In this article, an attempt is made to trace the impact of such populism on resources using Zimbabwe as a case study. The article suggests the facilitation of viable exploitation of natural resources by clearly defi ned communities as one solution to the sustainable use of resources.

International audience

International audience