Over the past twenty years, the focus of development policy has shifted from the state to the private sector. Privatisation is now central to utility reform in much of SSA. This paper sets out developments in water privatisation and reviews the evidence regarding its impact. Water privatisation has been carried out to some degree in at least fourteen countries in the region, and many other governments are at various stages in the privatisation process. However, in some cases privatisation has been difficult to achieve, and a few countries have successfully provided water under public ownership. Evidence on the impact of privatisation indicates that the performance of privatised utilities has not changed dramatically, but that enterprises have continued to perform well, or not so well, depending both on their state when they were privatised and on the wider economic context. The evidence points to internal improvements in terms of financial management. However, governments face considerable difficulties in attracting investors and regulating private utilities. Furthermore, privatisation fails to address some of the fundamental constraints affecting water utilities in SSA, such as finance, the politicised nature of service delivery, and lack of access for the poor. A preoccupation with ownership may obscure the wider goals of reform.

This paper examines the land occupations and fast-track resettlement process in Chiredzi district in Zimbabwe's southeast lowveld, and argues that their broad-brush representation as chaotic, violent and unplanned is misleading. In Zimbabwe the instruments and mechanisms of order assert themselves even in the midst of violent disorder. The on-going deployment of the formal and technical tools and discourses of land-use planning have been instrumental in securing the visibility and legitimacy of Zimbabwe's new settlers. The speed and short cuts of the fast-track land reform process and vagueness of policies to date have in the short term opened up a certain amount of space for negotiation and a degree of leeway and flexibility in land-use planning and allocation. But the danger for the settlers is that, by deploying a discourse rooted in long-held and institutionally embedded Rhodesian traditions of planning and control, they have played into a process that – as so often in Zimbabwe's history – will re-impose coercive land-use regulations that are at odds with their livelihood strategies and seek to vet settlers and so undermine populist claims of redressing inequalities and providing land to the landless and poor.

The article addresses possibilities and barriers to economic activity and development in the Oshana region of Northern Namibia. The focus is on the role of local embeddedness of economic activities in attaining economic development. A network perspective, based on theories of value chains that are embedded both in social relations and spatially, is selected as the analytical framework. The value chains of local black entrepreneurs in the study area are short. Moreover, the analysis reveals that social obligations may impede economic development, but that such practices are diminishing. The economic dominance and competition from South Africa is the main impediment to economic development in Northern Namibia. Local political embeddedness is shallow and political measures have not significantly reduced the implications of this dominance.

This article analyses a longstanding ethno-political conflict between Kusasis and Mamprusis in Bawku in north-east Ghana. A double argument is pursued. First, while communal conflict and violence challenge the state and expose its incapacity, the conflicts (played out over chieftaincy, party politics, land, markets, names of places etc.) at the same time invoke a powerful idea of the state as the most significant institution to qualify claims as rights or discard them as illegitimate. Second, the broad variety of social conflicts has effectively been cut to fit an ethnic distinction. Thus, the various conflictual issues have ‘confirmed’ and structured each other. The antagonisms have been crystallised and a pattern entrenching conflict between the two groups has been perpetuated. The article draws historical lines from the 1930s to the present, linking national policy to local politics and political culture with a particular focus on the political manifestations vis-à-vis the state and the use of ‘history’ to justify claims.

There is much disagreement about the effect that income distribution has on economic growth. This study uses high-quality household-expenditure-based data to estimate this effect for a sample of sub-Saharan African states. It uses an ordinary least squares (OLS) technique to estimate the effects of income inequality in a standard reduced-form growth regression for a set of cross-section data for the period 1986–97. It finds that higher levels of inequality seem to impinge negatively on growth prospects over the medium term, but that this effect is weak and that the finding of a negative relationship is not robust. It then tests whether this negative consequence of inequality for growth is attributable to inequality's effect on political instability, as the literature suggests. The evidence indicates that high levels of inequality do not affect political instability in any statistically significant manner for the countries in the sample, but that they do negatively affect the risk perceptions of potential investors, and so may contribute to lower growth prospects.

Many people have been surprised by the eruption of ethnic conflict and civil war in Ivory Coast. The country had gained a reputation as a relatively stable and economically prosperous agricultural republic in a region known for ethnic conflict, economic decline and civil war. The underlying factors that have led to the ethnic violence, the flight of immigrants from neighbouring countries, and the division of the country into a predominantly Muslim north and largely Christian south have been known for some time. The country's property rights regime that encouraged easy access to a forest rent – as long as cheap migrant labour and virgin forested land were available – was a recipe for future conflict. As available land declined and labour costs increased, a cycle of sharpening conflicts over these assets contributed to the current situation of ethno-regional division and civil war.