From Market-Led to State-Led Land Reform: A Political Economy Analysis of Zimbabwe’s Land Reform Programmes

The debate on Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform Programme implemented from 2000 onwards has largely focused on the land reform’s immediate socio-economic outcomes. The discussion has also been detached from Zimbabwe’s long term historical experience of land reform, neglecting to particularly examine the relationship between the first post-independence reform and the second one. Neoliberal categories of understanding have largely been employed in the debate, thus preventing the investigation of power dynamics and class relations that largely shaped the two reforms. In this dissertation, I set to contextualise the second land reform within Zimbabwe’s broader historical experience of land reform. I will draw attention to the class configurations and power relations, examining how group interests and their reactions to the land reform policies impacted on the two land reforms. Of central interest is investigating why and how Zimbabwe’s land reform, which was initially market-led, later on became radicalised. I will conclude by relating the country’s land reform experience to trends in global debates on land and agrarian reform.