A review of spatial planning in Ghana's socio-economic development trajectory: A sustainable development perspective

This study provides a review of spatial planning in the context of Ghana's socio-economic development trajectory. Spatial planning has been integral to the economic policies of the country since colonial rule. Yet, its role has been overshadowed by the domain of socio-economic planning. Drawing from published literature, policy documents, legislative frameworks and interviews, this study reveals the different context and scope within which spatial planning has been implemented in Ghana, and the successes and failures thereof. While the colonial governments employed spatial planning on limited scale and for exploitative purposes, post-colonial governments have implemented broad-based planning grounded in the ‘genuine’ aspiration to promote a spatially balanced development. This study argues that post-independence planning has not been successfully implemented compared to pre-independence planning due to a myriad of factors including rapid urban growth, inadequate staffing, low capacity, lack of institutional coordination, political interference in planning, complex land tenure and evolving land markets among others. Consequently, urban centres in Ghana are beset with problems such as poor environmental conditions, poor infrastructure and service delivery, and uncontrolled growth; and these are inimical to sustainable urban development. The study lauds renewed efforts to transform planning in the spirit of sustainable development through the national urban policy framework and a proposed land use and spatial planning bill; the latter proposes planning based on spatial development framework, and a repeal of an obsolete 1945 planning ordinance that has underlain planning since. It is argued that if supported and harmonised the two initiatives present the best planning framework in the 21st century Ghana.     

Policy Discourses on Women's Land Rights in Sub–Saharan Africa: The Implications of the Re–turn to the Customary

This article examines some contemporary policy discourses on land tenure reform in sub–Saharan Africa and their implications for women's interests in land. It demonstrates an emerging consensus among a range of influential policy institutions, lawyers and academics about the potential of so–called customary systems of land tenure to meet the needs of all land users and claimants. This consensus, which has arisen out of critiques of past attempts at land titling and registration, particularly in Kenya, is rooted in modernizing discourses and/or evolutionary theories of land tenure and embraces particular and contested understandings of customary law and legal pluralism. It has also fed into a wide–ranging critique of the failures of the post–colonial state in Africa, which has been important in the current retreat of the state under structural adjustment programmes. African women lawyers, a minority dissenting voice, are much more equivocal about trusting the customary, preferring instead to look to the State for laws to protect women's interests. We agree that there are considerable problems with so–called customary systems of land tenure and administration for achieving gender justice with respect to women's land claims. Insufficient attention is being paid to power relations in the countryside and their implications for social groups, such as women, who are not well positioned and represented in local level power structures. But considerable changes to political and legal practices and cultures will be needed before African states can begin to deliver gender justice with respect to land.     

What Was Left of the Groundnut Scheme? Development Disaster and Labour Market in Southern Tanganyika 1946–1952

The East African Groundnut Scheme in Tanganyika is probably the most dramatic and most cited failure of the ambitions of British late colonial developmentalism. Issues of labour supply in the scheme's short history, and the relationship of labour supply with the peasant economy of Southern Province, have received almost no attention, a gap which this article aims to begin to fill. It suggests that the implementation of the scheme gave rise to a political battle over labour market control between the colonial state in Tanganyika and scheme managers. The paper documents how, without any support from the colonial administration, the scheme attempted to recruit the large numbers of workers it required, and its frustrations in doing so. It investigates the factors that prevented labour supply satisfying demand, how peasants in the area engaged with the labour market (and were able to adjust their participation in it), and the impact of labour market growth on the household farm economy.     

The rise of peri-urban aquaculture in Nigeria

The development of fish farming in Nigeria is traced from the colonial period through decades of mostly subsistence farming to large-scale commercial catfish farming today. Most African countries have encountered difficulties breaking into profitable commercial fish farming; however, Nigeria's strongly growing population at some 150 million and its very high demand for fish positioned the country on a much more strongly market-driven path based on commercial production in peri-urban areas. With investment in good management, selection of the hardy catfish for farming, development of intensively managed fish hatcheries and use of high quality fish feeds, farmers established a new model for raising fish in concrete tanks, which greatly reduced poaching and allowed farmers to get full return on their investment within one year. The paper details costs and benefits. With prospects of good profits, a number of medium-scale investors, invested in farming fish in tanks in ‘fish farming villages’ (also called fish farm estates) located in peri-urban areas near large markets, where several hundred tanks were cooperatively managed. With high demand and market prices, they were able to obtain credit, using professional business plans and security documentation required by lenders.     

A Redivided Land? New Agrarian Conflicts and Questions in Zimbabwe

The recent land invasions in Zimbabwe represent a profound and contradictory revolution in that country's agrarian social order, with implications that have already spilled over the borders of this small southern African country. A settler colonial heritage that tenaciously mapped land and tenure forms into unequal zones according to race is giving way to a more complex and spatially diversi ?ed con?guration of agrarian property forms and production strategies. Control over access to the means of violence has been devolved to ruling party loyalists, war veterans, army personnel, provincial administrators and local councillors, thus shifting the forms and functions of power exercised in the name of the state and the nation. ‘Resettlement’, ‘squatting:rsquo; and ‘farm invasions’ constitute morally charged alternatives in the lexicon of movement across tenurial boundaries. Contested rights to land and to movement are mediated through discourses of national and sub‐national belonging and exclusion, with commercial farm workers – deemed foreigners – the chief victims. The dramatic challenge that the invasions pose to private property, and to the rule of law more generally, suggest the possible collapse of large‐scale capitalist farming and the withdrawal of aid and foreign investment. Yet, at the same time, new forms of capitalist investment in transnational safari hunting and eco‐tourism continue to nibble away at the land base of the most peripheral of the old African reserves, facilitated by the romantic idealism of international conservation NGOs, and the aggressive disciplinary impulses of Rural District Councils. The same shifts in patterns of elite global consumption have led conservative white ranchers to take down fences in favour of wildlife conservancies organized around a coextensive commonage. These profound, if contradictory, transformations in Zimbabwe's agrarian social order are illuminated by a new generation of ethnographically grounded scholarship, the range of which is represented in the contributions to this special issue of the Journal of Agrarian Change.     

A study on the influence of land institution on state-building in South Korea: Human resources

Since Korea was divided, conflict has continued between South and North Korea. However, preparation for the reunification of Korea needs to be considered consistently. Prior to this reunification, it is advisable to analyse the process of state-building in South Korea immediately following the liberation from Japanese colonial rule because this could be the foundation of the reunification of Korea. Meanwhile, land institution seems to have an influence on the process of state-building. Land institution appears to be connected to state-building economically, socially and politically, and, as this is the case, the German government also executed land reform for state-building following its unification in 1990. Regarding land institution, human resources (HR) seems to play a pivotal role. HR is in charge of the operation of land management organisations and acts to improve the related laws and systems, which seems to have a considerable impact on land institution. In light of the above, poor HR could have a negative influence on not only land institution, but also societal, economic and political aspects of state-building. Hence, this study reviews the influence of HR on land management in the process of state-building in South Korea immediately following the liberation from Japanese colonial rule; furthermore, related problems and their fundamental reasons are analysed.     

African Agricultural Development: Lessons and Challenges

This paper reviews what has been learned from experiences of African agriculture and hence what policy lessons may be. Views of African agriculture over the last 130 years have changed from optimism to pessimism and at least halfway back again as the performance of the sector has fluctuated. Fortunately it seems the deep pessimism about agricultural prospects expressed in the 1980s and 1990s has receded. The performance of African agriculture since 1990 suggests that neither those who doubt that any significant advances are taking place, nor those who see advances in some remarkable but perhaps isolated cases of rapid transformation of farming and agricultural supply chains, have sufficient evidence – either from national data or small‐scale studies – to support their positions. Hence policy has to rely largely on general principles and historic lessons, rather than more clearly proven propositions. Policy debates over African agricultural development may sharply divide on some topics, but there is little debate over the importance of basic conditions for agricultural development of an enabling investment climate and the provision of rural public goods. Beyond these basics, the challenge is to remedy the failings of markets that deny most smallholders access to inputs, financial services and insurance. Here opinion divides between whether to return to public provision, as with fertiliser subsidies, or whether private and collective institutional innovations will be sufficient. Recent initiatives to test and scale up the latter look promising, but most have yet to be evaluated. If agricultural development is first and foremost about establishing the basic conditions for growth, then most countries in Africa may be better placed than they have been in the past. Given the many examples that show African smallholders investing and innovating when they have the chance, then there are reasons to hope that the modest growth of production and productivity seen in the last two decades may accelerate in the future – thereby allowing African countries to make the transition from agrarian to urban economies.     

West African Insurgencies in Agrarian Perspective: Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone Compared

This paper examines agrarian issues in civil wars in Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone. Attention is paid to two different ways in which lineage society evolved during the colonial and post‐colonial periods. The motivations of fighters are related to these different trajectories of agrarian social change. In Côte d’Ivoire youth militia fought to uphold a lineage‐based social order, but in Sierra Leone a comparable group of young fighters sought to overturn it. Large migrant populations on a forest frontier are an important factor in Côte d’Ivoire, while in Sierra Leone significance attaches to an excluded agrarian underclass. Not all African conflicts are ethnic conflicts; autochthony is shown to be a factor in one conflict and class in the other. Approaches to post‐war reconstruction based on undifferentiated notions of community should be resisted.     

The West African middle belt: Land use patterns and development problems

The West African Middle Belt is an area of limited resources, low population density and a severe agricultural climate. Many reasons have been given for the poor state of agriculture in this region, but a look at the agricultural communities of tropical Africa clearly shows that land use cannot be explained by physical and environmental factors alone. For this reason, decision makers must increasingly take into account socioeconomic factors when making policy decisions for development in these peripheral zones.     

Negative evaluation of conservation agriculture: perspectives from African smallholder farmers

Despite more than three decades of promotion, conservation agriculture (CA) has not been widely adopted by smallholder farmer in sub-Saharan Africa. This low rate of adoption reflects substantial negative evaluation of CA by many smallholder farmers, the causes of which have not been adequately explored in an in-depth, qualitative manner. Hence, we implement the Livelihoods Platforms Approach to explore directly with negatively evaluating farmers the reasons why they chose not to implement CA using semi-structured interviews with 35 farmers from 23 communities in 6 African countries. While there are issues with perceived benefit and relevance, the primary driver of negative evaluation of CA was found to be the feasibility of implementation. The required resources to implement CA (financial, physical, human and informational) are limited by community and institutional constraints which appear unlikely to be overcome through interventions targeted at addressing household resources. More positive evaluation of CA by smallholder farmers requires: (1) development of financially viable CA adoption pathways; (2) incorporation of wider livelihood objectives into a CA ‘package’; (3) re-evaluation of current extension policy; and (4) development of CA-complementary agricultural policies. Without addressing these issues, the potential benefits of CA adoption are unlikely to be achieved in African smallholder systems.     

Dynamics in national agri-environmental policy implementation under changing EU policy priorities: Does one size fit all?

Over the past 30 years, Agri-Environmental Policies (AEP) in the EU have developed with relative national autonomy and according to the subsidiarity principle. The environmental directives represent an increase in EU-level environmental ambitions and challenge the current implementation of EU AEP by creating an increasingly demanding set of regulations with which each member state must comply. National AEP implementation may, however, maintain original characteristics and fail to adopt or transform as EU policy implementation proceeds or when EU policies develop. This creates a potential gap between EU policies and national policy implementation resulting in the ensuing national policy dynamics and adaptations becoming issues of interest. This raises a central question regarding the extent to which national AEP implementation can help us predict whether AEP will be suitable to achieve environmental directive objectives nationally in the future. In this paper, we first investigate the dynamics in the implementation of national Agri-Environmental Schemes (AES) through changes in (i) AES policy objectives over time, (ii) administrative implementation structures, and (iii) administrative policy decision structures in the Netherlands, Denmark, Greece, Austria and Romania. Second, we examine the extent to which various factors have influenced the development of national policies over time. The study identifies development based on the theory of ‘process of institutional change’, i.e. we qualitatively estimate the costs of change based on proposed factors including economic conditions in relation to AES implementation, political institutional capacity, policy legacy, policy preferences, and current discourse. On this background, we identify differences in implementation strategies or outcomes in terms of inertia, absorption and transformation, which are characteristic of the national responses to changing AEP at the EU level. We discuss AES dynamics; whether policy content or structures should be in focus for future policy design and the implications of these findings for the future role of AEP in fulfilling environmental directives and argue why a one size fits all rule does not adequately cover current AES development.     

Using participatory rural appraisal and participatory research and extension in a post-independence environment: a case from East Timor

A participatory rural appraisal (PRA) conducted in East Timor in 2004 as part of an agricultural development project provided the basis for a number of community-based participatory extension initiatives. The PRA involved several communities throughout a watershed and also served as a training exercise for local agriculture ministry staff. Despite the poverty of many of the communities involved, and in contrast to published literature on the local agricultural situation, farmers clearly expressed their need for more marketable crops and alternative sources of livelihoods. Their desires contrasted with the project's initial assumption that the major need was for increased production of staple crops to alleviate food scarcity. The project consequently branched out from concentrating on basic agronomy of staple crops into developing marketable crops, improving livestock production and facilitating development of a local business. Farmers' groups were set up to allow farmers to develop their own agricultural enterprises. Some ministry staff who participated in the project welcomed the opportunity to move from the traditional authoritarian extension system set up under Indonesian colonial rule to a more collegial and educational system. The breakdown of institutions and lines of authority following independence may create new opportunities for participatory development in newly independent states.     

African indigenous vegetable enterprises and market access for small-scale farmers in East Africa

African indigenous vegetables (AIVs) have been part of the food systems in sub-Saharan Africa for generations. The region is a natural habitat for more than 45,000 species of plants, of which about 1,000 can be eaten as green leafy or fruit vegetables that happen to be the mainstay of traditional diets. During the colonial era, adventurers and slavers sailing in Africa introduced exotic plants such as maize, cassava and beans and, later, commercial crops such as sugarcane, cocoa, coffee and cotton, which began contributing more to life. Farmers integrated these crops into their age-old livelihood strategies at the expense of traditional subsistence crops. AIVs were almost entirely neglected and considered ‘poor people's' plants. To reverse the trend, FARM-Africa and its partners reintroduced AIVs which are now forming part of families’ diets as well as becoming a source of income for smallholder farmers in Arumeru, Tanzania and Kiambu, Kenya. AIVs are robust and productive, and thus well suited to feeding the hungriest and most vulnerable sections of society.     

Women's Struggle to Escape Rural Poverty in South Africa

Results of a purposive sample of the poorest are contrasted with the methods and conclusions of other research into 'income poverty'. The deprivation suffered by an important class of rural women in South Africa is documented. Escape routes from poverty are described that have a more realistic prospect of success than those promoted in the international and South African policy literature, including the literature on land reform. The distinguishing demographic characteristics of women who have taken the first steps on these routes are analysed, together with the political context of their relative success. Escaping the worst forms of deprivation depends on women's wages in rural labour markets, rather than their incomes from self-employment, but conventional microeconomic theory cannot explain the distribution of wages in these markets. The South African government has been unduly influenced by such conventional theories and the rhetoric of the development aid bureaucracy. It is failing to consider policies that are relevant to the poorest people.     

Industrial upgrading and development in Lesotho’s apparel industry: global value chains,foreign direct investment,and market diversification

Many low-income countries are integrated into apparel global value chains through foreign direct investment (FDI), including Lesotho, which has become the largest Sub-Saharan African apparel exporter to the US under the African Growth and Opportunity Act. More recently, South Africa has emerged as a new apparel export market in Lesotho. The two markets are supplied by different types of FDI firms – affiliates of Taiwanese transnational producers and South African manufacturers – which are part of different value chain variants. The paper assesses the implications for industrial upgrading and development of integration into these two value chain variants in Lesotho, drawing on firm-level and institutional interviews. We show that their different characteristics in terms of investors’ motivation, governance structure, end markets, firm set up and most importantly and causally, ownership and embeddedness have crucial impacts on functional, product and process upgrading, local linkages, and skill development.     

Racial land zoning in urban South Africa

The imposition of the policy of apartheid upon South African urban areas after the National Party electoral victory in 1948, led to profound changes in spatial planning and population distribution. All urban places were zoned with sectors set aside for the mutually exclusive ownership and occupation of legally defined racial groups. Between 1950 and 1991 over 1 million hectares of urban land were zoned in racial terms. Massive population movements took place to fit the population to the plans, which had built-in disparities between groups in access to urban land. Even with the repeal of this legislation, South African cities exhibit the heritage of apartheid planning, with the racially defined zones still apparent in the urban form.     

Colonialism and environmental perception in Northern Nigeria

Concern about the environment in colonial northern Nigeria developed out of a series of controversies and practices, particularly those relating to agriculture. Increasingly, local practices that have sustained the population and the environment for centuries are subjected to “scientific” scrutiny. Though many of these practices were either misunderstood or not understood at all, this did not stop the subjugation of local practices to “science”. However, this “scientific” enterprise was often conflict-ridden, with important questions being resolved only after the intervention of political authorities. The resulting colonial practices in the fields of irrigation, forest management and the application of chemical fertilizer continue to dominate the thinking of state officials in post-colonial Nigeria, leading to unsustainable policies. An earlier colonial tradition of investigating the practices of local farmers and the constraints therein would have been a more appropriate basis for post-colonial policy.     

The effect of barge and ocean freight price volatility in international grain markets

Short‐run responses of export and domestic shares of total agricultural output to changes in stocks of domestic savings (SAV), development assistance (ODA), private foreign commercial capital (PFX) and other variables is investigated. A profit function approach is used. Time series data for 19 sub‐Saharan African countries are pooled into three panels using similarities in changes in economic policy regime. Statistical evidence suggests that for the panel of countries that were undertaking liberalized economic reforms, the slope coefficients of some of the variables in the models have changed significantly between 1970–1980 and 1981–1993. For the 1981–1993 period, the impacts of ODA, PFX and SAV on export and domestic shares were different for this panel. The effect of increases in agricultural labor was different across the three panels. There is also evidence that productivity growth in the export agriculture sub‐sector is negative in all the groups. It is recommended that to halt the decline in export share of agricultural output in the group of countries that have undertaken substantial improvements in economic policy environment, efforts must be made to reduce the negative impact of domestic savings and agricultural labor, while at the same time working to reduce the bias of development assistance against food security.     

铸魂·健体·赋能·塑形——新时代党的建设伟大工程之结构解析

新时代党的建设伟大工程是新时代党领导的伟大事业及新时代精神的先导和精华。它在理论与实践上展现为一个以政治建设和思想建设铸魂,以组织建设、纪律和制度建设健体,以长期的执政能力建设赋能,以作风建设和反腐倡廉建设塑形的系统工程。不断推进这一系统工程建设,既是永葆党的先进性和人民性的内在要求,也是实现现代化、共圆"中国梦"的根本保证。     

Mining towns and urban sprawl in South Africa

South Africa’s mining towns were established by mining companies mostly after World War II. The workforce lived in company-owned or privately-owned houses, or high-density compounds. Since the demise of apartheid, South African government policy for these towns has promoted integrated mining communities and homeownership. The government’s urban policy aims to densify the country’s urban areas, which have some of the lowest urban densities. This paper compares the changes in urban density and the unintended land-use implications of mining in settlements around five types of mines: iron ore, manganese, coal, gold and platinum, and in a combination of towns during periods of mining boom and bust. We ask how the South African legal framework addresses land issues that are associated with mining settlements, how urban density has evolved in the five case studies; and how this evolution should be explained. We argue that the sprawl is associated with historical path dependencies and interdependencies. Contributing factors are the need to house miners, the unintended consequences of policies designed to minimise compound living, changing labour regimes, the continuation of migrant labour and the presence of traditional-authority land. This sprawl is evident in market-driven housing, government-subsidised housing and informal settlement development.