Negotiating the State through Inclusion in the Community. Elite Formation in Decentralised Resource Management in Chimanimani, Mozambique

After the first multi-party elections of 1994 in Mozambique, the new Government of FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) accepted the prescriptions of the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and of the donor countries as a strategy to access capital crucial to rehabilitate and then to develop the country. In this context, the Western countries’ catchwords regarding development in the 1990s have been translated into guiding principles of the reform programmes of the State and the economy. Inspired, in principle, by the ideas of decentralisation of natural resource management and of making the State more accountable to “local needs” are the new policies on land, on forests and wildlife (including the community-based programmes in conservation areas), and on community authorities implemented by the Government from the mid-1990s. Based on a field-work in the conservation area of Chimanimani, district of Sussundenga, this paper analyses the way in which these reforms taken together are fitting the conceptual and physical definition of the “rural community” into the wider project of consolidating the institutions of the State in the rural areas of the country. Above all, it seems that today in Mozambique, as happened in other African countries such as Zimbabwe in the past, land tenure reform is linked fundamentally to State making. The main argument put forward in this article is that, while the community rights on resources and the geographical boundaries of these communities are being fixed by the above reforms, the limits and composition of “the community” are also being shaped by the path taken by the agendas of local political elites with an interest in being included as primary actors in these communities