Institutions in natural resource management: a review of Zimbabwean experiences

Abstract

The paper discusses processes of natural resources management in Zimbabwe. It reveals that management of natural resources is an activity that communities engage in as part of their daily lives. Natural resource management reflects cultural, demographic and cultural realities. Colonialism and the era of technological modernity it brought changed the capacity of communities to manage resources and destabilized the traditional authority structures which had formed the base for resource conservation and management. The advent of Zimbabwean independence saw government inadvertently continuing the dis-empowerment and subversion of traditional authorities by creating new structures for communal land administration. In the process, a contested and chaotic institutional framework for communal land administration and implicitly natural resource management came into being.