Spatial politics of power: land, patronage and control in Caledonia, Harare

Abstract

Land governance remains a critical determinant of urban stability in Africa, mediating the relationship between state authority and access to resources. This article interrogates how Zimbabwe’s national political settlement strategically reconfigured land governance in Caledonia, a peri-urban settlement in Harare. Adopting a qualitative case study design, the study utilised 54 in-depth interviews with community members, state officials, planners and researchers, along with three community focus group discussions with 30 participants, for a total of 84 respondents. These primary data were complemented by the triangulation of government and municipal documents. The findings demonstrate that institutional overlap in Caledonia is not an accidental technical failure, but a deliberate outcome of a political settlement that prioritises elite survival and informal control over coherent urban governance. Through a process of institutional layering, the central government successfully bypassed opposition-led local authorities to instrumentalise land as a primary tool for patronage. The article contributes to Global South debates by illustrating how political settlements generate layered and competing institutions that sustain informality ‘in the shadow of the state’. These dynamics reveal that tenure security in such contexts is governed by a logic of partisan citizenship, with significant implications for peri-urban development and the limitations of technocratic reform.