The project provides a critical analysis of land reform in the peri-urban West District of Zanzibar, Tanzania, from 1985 to 2005. These two decades have brought dual reforms in the form of a transition to multi-party democratic governance and a transformation of economic development policy toward neoliberal (market-based) development. Land reform represents a critical and as-yet unexamined spatial dimension of this dual reform process. The study tests key competing theoretical assumptions in the geographical literatures on development and on environmental justice and injustice: that neoliberal and democratic governance policies are pro-poor, that neoliberal governance is inseparable from geographically uneven development (GUD), and that marginalized communities bear the brunt of negative environmental consequences in GUD. The research empirically examines how land use planning processes have changed, targeting three case study areas of West District and the role of Finland's aid agency, Finnida, in reform processes. The primary objective is to assess the degree to which the reforms have increased or decreased environmental injustice, defined as the socially uneven distribution of environmental costs and benefits from urbanization. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, the study will gauge environmental injustice in the District for 1985-2005 in terms of: 1) unequal access for different social groups to high quality land; and 2) greater negative environmental consequences for the marginalized poor in informal settlements in the form of proximity to different specific hazards. The study tests the theory that environmental injustice present in West District is contingent upon the particular character of social, political, economic, and cultural relations present in specific zones of the District at a given time. Information will be gathered through focus groups, social surveys, interviews, and participant observation, as well as archival research, document study, and basic geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing analysis, creating a multi-faceted ethnography of state-society relations.
This project will make a novel contribution to advancing geographic knowledge in the analysis of development policy and the urban environment. It will contribute significantly to analysis of the relations between political and economic reform processes and environmental justice within peri-urban land reform processes around the developing world by addressing three specific gaps in the relevant social science literatures. These are the: 1) relative absence of Africa-based critical political analyses of urban environmental planning outside of South Africa, 2) comparative silence on African cities in African studies of dual reform (which are dominated by studies of elections and national economic policy), and 3) general lack of a critique in development geography of the substantial and geo-politically important amounts of Nordic aid to African cities in the dual reform era. This project incorporates Zanzibari researchers, broadening the participation of an underserved population, Sub-Saharan Africans, and enhancing the research networks of urban political ecology by developing linkages between Tanzania, Finland, and the US.
