<p>The thesis examines continuity and change in the agrarian history of the Mwenezi District, southern Zimbabwe since 1980. It analyses agrarian reforms, agrarian practices and development initiatives in the district and situates them in the localised livelihood strategies of different people within the Dinhe Communa Area and the Mangondi resettlement Area in Lieu of the Fast-Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) since 2000. The thesis also examines the livelihood opportunities and challenges presented by the FTLRP to the inhabitants of Mwenezi.The thesis contributes to the growing body of empirical studies on the impact of Zimbabwe's ongoing land reform programme and to debates and discourses on agrarian reform.</p>

<p>The study adopted qualitative research methods because the issues to be researched are complex social matters. The approach was three-pronged. Firstly, a desktop assessment of the claim was done. Secondly, semi-structured interviews were conducted with selected households in the community to understand their experiences after dispossession and their perception of the restitution claim. Thirdly, a combination of desktop analysis and household interviews was employed to understand the socio-economic dynamics and evaluate the feasibility of the community&rsquo / s perceptions.</p>

This thesis is a collection of three essays in which the behaviour of unemployment is studied in different dynamic environments. Throughout, unemployment is understood to be involuntary, arising due to the uncoordinated nature of trade in the labour market as viewed from the perspective of the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides equilibrium matching model. It goes without saying that the fundamental motivation for pursuing this line of research is provided by the untold consequences, both human and economic, of otherwise capable people remaining involuntarily idle. An attempt, therefore, is made to contribute to the understanding of how various aspects of macroeconomic policy can influence unemployment outcomes. The approach maintained throughout is to combine general equilibrium modelling with simulation techniques in order to provide not only qualitative inferences but also quantitative descriptions of equilibrium dynamics. The dynamic environments considered cover both the business cycle (the first two chapters) and the life cycle (the third chapter). In the first chapter, Structural Tax Reform and the Cyclical Behaviour of the Labour Market, we build a real business cycle model with frictional unemployment and distortionary tax rates which are increasing in individual taxable labour income. The cyclical aspects of tax reform that are addressed in this chapter are distinct from the stationary state distributional issues that have garnered most of the attention in the existing literature on structural tax reform. Estimating the tax code parameters from federal income tax return data for the U.S., we find that a reduction in the progressivity of the tax system is associated with a significant increase in the volatility of hours per worker. The intuition is simply that the greater the extent to which marginal tax rates fluctuate in response to shocks, the smaller the incentive to adjust working hours. But in a frictional labour market in which it is costly for forms to issue vacancies, the behaviour of hours - i.e. intensive adjustment, or adjustment in the intensive margin - is a determining factor of job creation - i.e. extensive adjustment. We then explain how the dynamic behaviour of hours along the adjustment path to an aggregate productivity shock generates o¤setting incentives for job creation, with the result that tax reform has little impact on unemployment fluctuations. The welfare cost of the business cycle is also computed under different tax regimes. It is found that although business cycles are more costly under a flat tax, the overall welfare implications are quantitatively negligible regardless of the tax system. Having described the effects of the tax system on equilibrium dynamics when perturbed by a productivity disturbance, we then consider business cycle adjustment to an aggregate demand shock in the form of fiscal stimulus. In light of recent fiscal developments in the U.S. and Europe, the ability of expansionary fiscal policy to stimulate output has gained renewed interest in the business cycle literature. We contribute to the analysis by assessing whether the efficacy of government expenditure in reducing unemployment depends on the structure of the tax system. It is demonstrated that a less progressive tax policy increases the ability of expansionary fiscal policy to stimulate output due to a larger response in hours, but this comes at the cost of a smaller unemployment multiplier. Tax reform therefore causes a compositional shift in labour market adjustment in response to aggregate demand shocks, with relatively more adjustment occurring in the intensive margin and less adjustment in the extensive margin the flatter the tax schedule is. The reason why this compositional shift occurs for a demand shock but not a supply shock is that the adjustment path of hours is qualitatively dependent on the type of disturbance. In particular, we describe how equilibrium undershooting in hours occurs only in response to an aggregate productivity (supply) shock, whereas the negative wealth effects arising from increased government expenditure exert sustained upward pressure on hours along the entire adjustment path, thus providing a significant incentive for firms to substitute away from job creation. The second chapter, Monetary Policy and Job Creation in a New Keynesian Model, is motivated by the work of Cooley and Quadrini (1999) and Krause and Lubik (2007). These studies indicate that a typical monetary business cycle model with frictional unemployment and endogenous job destruction tends to encounter difficulty in generating a rise in job creation in response to expansionary monetary policy, rendering the model inconsistent with the downward sloping Beveridge curve that appears in the data and implying only a limited policy role for inflationary job creation. Matching frictions in the labour market congest the job creation process so that firms tend to skew adjustment to shocks towards the job destruction margin. In recognition of the assertion put forth but unpursued by Cooley and Quadrini (1999) that fluctuations in the size of the labour force may ease labour market congestion and therefore amplify cyclical job creation, in Chapter II we extend a New Keynesian model with unemployment to feature an endogenous labour market participation decision. However, a baseline model with a standard degree of risk aversion tends to exhibit countercyclical labour force participation, which is inconsistent with the data. In order to address this issue, we propose the notion of labour market participation as a social consideration, which we demonstrate to be capable of generating procyclical participation incentives. The basic idea is that agents will tend not to exit the labour force during booms in order to "keep up with the Joneses". We then find that plausible fluctuations in the size of the labour force do not exert a quantitatively significant effect on job creation. In light of this result, we search for alternative mechanisms which may overturn the conclusion that inflationary policy is incapable of incentivising job creation. The approach taken involves switching focus to the characteristics of aggregate demand dynamics along the adjustment path to a monetary shock. It is well known that standard New Keynesian models fail to deliver the gradual, hump-shaped adjustment path to monetary policy shocks that is observed in the data. We argue that if aggregate demand experiences a persistent increase in response to a monetary shock instead of peaking on impact, the incentive for firms to create jobs becomes amplified. The intuition is that, since the job creation decision is forward-looking due to the presence of matching frictions, aggregate demand must rise persistently even after the shock takes place so that firms anticipate a further increase in aggregate demand in order for the time consuming process of issuing a vacancy to be justified. To demonstrate this, it is shown that, by altering the dynamics of aggregate demand, time-inseparability in the utility function can significantly improve the ability of expansionary monetary policy to increase job creation, allowing the model to generate a downward sloping Beveridge curve conditional on monetary shocks. In the appendix to Chapter II, we lend further credence to this hypothesis by describing how the manner in which monetary policy it- self is specified may give rise to hump-shaped adjustment dynamics and, consequently, amplify inflationary job creation. Finally, in Chapter III on Equilibrium Matching and Age Discrimination Policy, we abstract from business cycle issues and concentrate instead on the life cycle. Federal legislation prohibiting the discrimination of workers on the basis of age has been in place in the United States since the 1967 Age Discrimination in Employment Act.

This study describes the policymaking process and policy solutions enacted in the Kentucky Postsecondary Improvement Act of 1997 (or House Bill 1). The study employs both an historical recounting of the story of House Bill 1 and a narrative analysis of opinion-editorials and policymaker interviews to reveal and explain how political power comprised both the perennial problem of Kentuckys higher education policymaking and the tool with which conflicts over power distribution were resolved. The study uses three theoretical frameworks (the Multiple-Streams, Punctuated-Equilibrium, and Political Frame) to explore the rise of restructuring on Kentuckys policymaking agenda, its most contentious issue (separation of community college governance from the University of Kentucky), and how the conflict engendered by this issue was resolved. Use of rigorous investigative methods and theoretical frameworks resulted in understandings of not only what drove the policymaking effort but also the strategies that enabled the initiative to rise on Kentuckys policymaking agenda and to be enacted. The study concludes: (1) the presence of a policy entrepreneur increases the likelihood of a strong change effort (and to its success if that entrepreneur is the governor); (2) issue definition, or redefinition, is key to reform efforts; and (3) while prior higher education policy studies and K-12 reform may soften up and prepare the policy community for discussions of reform, they have not been shown to affect the proposal development or enactment phases of a higher education restructuring initiative. Additional insights emerged from looking at the Kentucky case, informed by those of Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) before it, and of similar initiatives in Ohio and Illinois. This review suggests: 1. The impetus and leadership for significant change to a higher education system will likely arise externally versus internally 2. Redefining the issues of higher education in a way that changes participants perspectives and positions is an important factor in building support and opposition to an initiative. 3. Restructuring efforts, either intentionally or unintentionally, will ultimately have to address perceived and/or real power imbalances among institutions and between institutions and state agencies. 4. Redistributing power within a higher education system constitutes a change, but not necessarily an improvement to the system. The study concludes that opportunity data, research, and rational arguments to inform policy development from academia to inform and influence elected officials occurs very early in the start of a reform initiative or even years prior. It also finds the opportunity for influence diminishes as debate over policy alternatives and enactment increases. This suggests reluctance on the part of academia to include elected officials in the issues of the campus may reduce opportunities for data, research and rational arguments to influence the opinions, policies, and decisions of elected leaders. The study recommends: (1) that academia should become more engaged, on a substantative and continuing level, with elected leaders, and (2) that researchers focus on how elected leaders form their ideas on higher education and how these influence and result in policy and political positions.

State failure represents one of the most pressing concerns for international security in the 21st century, and Afghanistan represents one of the most concerted efforts ever witnessed to address this phenomenon in a lasting and sustainable way. This thesis takes the position that part of the difficulty in finding a remedy for state failure relates to the contradictions and dilemmas inherent within the state-building enterprise itself. The trade-offs required by certain fundamental aspects of state-building must be better understood if they are to be effectively managed, and these trade-offs cannot be understood without critically analysing the basic assumptions of state-building. To come to grips with these assumptions in concrete terms, this paper examines the European Union’s involvement in Afghanistan as a case study to apply and develop the analytical framework of “dilemma analysis.” The first major goal of this research will be to outline the tensions within state-building, and to assess their usefulness for explaining some of the difficulties facing state-builders in general terms. The second goal will be to analyse the significance of the specific combination of dilemmas relevant to the case of Afghanistan, in order to show how those dilemmas interact with each other to constrain the EU’s options for effective state-building. The third goal is to identify ways in which the EU and the international community in general can benefit from dilemma analysis when conducting state-building interventions in the future.

In this action research project, a multimethodology (MM) approach for planning community development projects (CDPs) is proposed. The MM approach is composed of four planning stages; three Soft OR approaches; and a theoretical framework for sustainable community development. The aim of the research is to examine MM’s potential benefits in facilitating group planning and decisionmaking within the context of a particular CDP in Colombia. Thus, the research centres attention on illustrating a theoretical informed way for designing MMs and a systematic procedure for evaluating their impacts in practice. A case study is undertaken in order to evaluate MM’s benefits in a real-world situation. It unfolds within the context of a Colombian governmental project that seeks to improve the socioeconomic conditions of a group of families living in a deprived community in Colombia. MM is employed in order to assist an organisation to design ideas for new business units for some of the families of this community. The case study entails dealing with different complexities and difficulties, including with a decision-team that had highly deteriorated working relations between its members. The results suggest that the main benefits of MM were not only related to clarifying and structuring the content of the problem, but also to improving the quality of the social interactions between the members of this conflicting team. Hence, it seems that MMs might facilitate decision-teams to deal with some of the most common complexities that can be found in CDP-related problems, such as: assessing trade-offs between multiple community’s dimensions, managing uncertainty, etc., as well as facilitate the negotiation process of conflicting ideas and improve the quality of the CDPs planned by them. In this regard, this research aims to be able to contribute to the literature in MM and Community OR (i.e. OR for community development).

Since 2000, mixed-tenure development has been advocated in planning policy guidance to local authorities in England, as a means of providing subsidised housing alongside market rate properties. This research explores residents’ experiences of three large, high-density, mixed-tenure housing developments in East London. A combination of in-depth interviews and survey responses provide insights into various aspects of daily life in these schemes, including interpersonal contacts and social relations between residents, attitudes towards tenure-based differences, and perceptions of the local neighbourhood. These insights are, in turn, situated within the context of an analysis of the provision process for mixed-tenure housing, based on interviews with key informants from housing associations, developers, architects and regeneration agencies. Policies for tenure-mixing ostensibly constitute a novel means of providing subsidised housing within a more social inclusive residential form. However, this research reveals a distinctly ordinary quality to everyday life in mixed-tenure schemes, within which the majority of interactions between residents were casual and infrequent, with relatively few close or sustained relationships, especially with between those from different social, economic or cultural backgrounds. On the other hand, these ‘mixed communities’ were by no means immune to tensions, divisions or prejudice. In both these respects, residents’ actions, attitudes and experiences did not correspond to ambitious propositions for tenure mixing to create an inherently more ‘inclusive’ social milieu with instrumental benefits for lower-income residents. This combination of banal and occasionally divisive social relations therefore appears to challenge the rationale for policy programmes to ‘engineer’ positive social relations through market-led interventions in housing provision. Rather, if this model of mixed-tenure housing provision does have a role in structuring the lives of residents’, it is arguably through design strategies that in fact function to keep inhabitants of different tenure groups apart.

This thesis is an ethnographic study of the Uruguayan programme CEIBAL, which aims to promote social inclusion by providing children and teachers with laptop computers. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that it illustrates empirically the complicated work of conceiving, implementing and sustaining policy in practice, both at the macro level and through local instantiations. This was achieved in three inter-related ways. First, by looking at how the national project of development was conceptualised around themes of techno-modernity and consolidated the promise of inclusiveness through claims on the universality of ‘technical needs’. Technology provided the conceptual space in which to resolve a presumed dichotomy between themes of equality, education and paternalistic state and those of economic development, modernisation and innovation. Second, it was analysed by exploring the way in which heterogeneous assemblages of people, values, laptops, and interests, were mobilized to stabilize the programme’s material and conceptual order across a wide range of sites and actors. This was based on the recognition of a ‘natural affinity’ between CEIBAL and Uruguay, which concealed differences, provided coherence and built a strong sense of ‘national consensus’. And finally, as a result of the other two, it was analysed by examining the relationship between ‘the technical’ and ‘the social’ as inscriptions and ‘fudged’ values objectified in the device faced users and their expectations. This implied looking at how CEIBAL officials attempted to make the laptop embody a political and moral project of inclusion, and its infinite promises, so that it could perform them. People in the three localities studied in this thesis (Montevideo, Paysandú and Queguayar) created very tangible strategies for dealing with notions of ‘social inclusion’, expressed different understandings of how technologies created possibilities for them and enacted these beliefs through a wide range of practices. This included the creation of new metaphors of ‘social inclusion’ through the notion of ‘connectivity,’ reconfiguring both social values and definitions of what constitute ‘connections’ as a result: the laptop’s ability to connect children with each ‘wired up the social fabric.’ These negotiations over the possibility of making connections are explored through a new concept that I refer to as ‘geographies of possibilities,’ which describes topographies of power that influence people’s ability to make technology perform. The key to this notion lies in the recognition of several forms of agency that are enacted in strategies to navigate through different geographies: people are not mere recipients of policy but active constituents of its various forms and instantiations in practice.

This thesis consists of a brief introduction, which situates the work within in the intellectual history of development theory, and three papers that address important gaps in our understanding about the dynamics of urbanisation and urban development in sub-Saharan Africa. The first provides an interdisciplinary, historical perspective on the dynamics of urbanisation and urban growth in the region from the colonial era to the present day. I argue that these processes are fundamentally driven by mortality decline set in motion by improvements in disease control and food security. Viewed through this lens, the widely noted phenomena of ‘urbanisation without growth’ and very rapid urban population growth in the late 20th century are not as unusual as they have often been portrayed by development economists and policymakers. The second addresses the question of why sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate of slum incidence of any major world region. I argue that slums can be interpreted as a consequence of ‘disjointed modernization’ in which urban population growth outpaces economic and institutional development. I trace the origins of disjointed modernization in sub-Saharan Africa back to the colonial period and show that colonial era investments and institutions are reflected in contemporary variation in slum incidence. I argue that ‘status quo interests’ and the rise of an anti-urbanisation bias in development discourse have inhibited investment and reform in the post-colonial era. The final paper presents and tests an empirical model designed to account for variation in urban protest activity across countries in the region. The model is comprised of basic demographic, political and economic factors that theoretically influence the motives, means and opportunities of potential protestors. The results of a panel data analysis are consistent with the core hypotheses, but several unexpected results emerge. More research is required to confirm these results, clarify mechanisms and account for broader trends in contentious collective action in the region.

This thesis is concerned with the way that modern political change affects social relationships in a prosperous predominantly Greek-Cypriot village. The first chapter traces the main social, political, demographic and economic changes to have affected the village in this century. The second chapter considers in detail the importance of landholdings, of supplementary occupations, and of status distinctions derived from education and work in the villagers' system of social evaluation. Chapter 3, in considering kinship and affinity as institutional constraints on the conduct of individuals, also stresses one prize of success in the village arena - the desirability of one's children as marriage partners. The fourth chapter is concerned with other types of social relations which constrain men, in particular fictive kinship, friendship and membership in the village itself (which is defined in a number of ways); this leads directly to the description of the village as a solidary community. Chapter 5 analyses the leadership opportunities provided by administrative office in the village, and considers how far power is achieved and diffused in other ways. Chapter 6 examined the scope of politics in the village, particularly the meaning of the opposition between left and right wing supporters, as well as the benefits of political alignment. The seventh chapter is a brief survey of politics leading up to Independence in 1959-60, and a slightly fuller discussion of the events of the last decade. Chapters 8 to 11 are all concerned with the detailed description and analysis of the most important political processes to affect the village since Independence. A number of internal disputes are the subject of chapter 85 in chapter 9 the village, in alliance with neighbouring villages, struggles to get government to start building a dam; in chapter 10 the administration of an agricultural cooperative shows prominent villagers in action, while chapter 11 concerns the first important elections to have taken place in the island for ten years, as they were seen to affect the village. In the final chapter I assess the introduction of new political resources into village politics, and the various ways in which some measure of control over political conflict is maintained.