Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an uncaptured peasantry

There is increasing emphasis on the need for effective ways of sharing knowledge to enhance environmental management and sustainability. Knowledge exchange (KE) are processes that generate, share and/or use knowledge through various methods appropriate to the context, purpose, and participants involved. KE includes concepts such as sharing, generation, coproduction, comanagement, and brokerage of knowledge. This paper elicits the expert knowledge of academics involved in research and practice of KE from different disciplines and backgrounds to review research themes, identify gaps and questions, and develop a research agenda for furthering understanding about KE. Results include 80 research questions prefaced by a review of research themes. Key conclusions are: (1) there is a diverse range of questions relating to KE that require attention; (2) there is a particular need for research on understanding the process of KE and how KE can be evaluated; and (3) given the strong interdependency of research questions, an integrated approach to understanding KE is required. To improve understanding of KE, action research methodologies and embedding evaluation as a normal part of KE research and practice need to be encouraged. This will foster more adaptive approaches to learning about KE and enhance effectiveness of environmental management.

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Knowledge exchange: a review and research agenda for environmental management

This vision of a “built” community is one in which residents look out for both themselves and for others, creating environments in which a critical proportion of residents is positively invested. It follows that the community-building process would focus on providing ways for people in the neighborhood to connect meaningfully with one another. A strong or “built” community could be identified by: 1) a large number of block associations and civic participation (attendance at town meetings; voting; school board attendance), 2) stable local voluntary associations, 3) high levels of informal neighbor-to-neighbor interaction, or 4) all of the above.1

Social capital and community building

Dams and Development: Transnational Struggles for Water and Power. By Sanjeev Khagram. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004. 270p. $45.00 cloth, $21.95 paper. This is a strong example of recent work in political science that mines the boundary of comparative politics and international relations to identify the complex sources of political change. Sanjeev Khagram draws on an intensive case study of the Narmada Dam projects in India and the increasingly successful transnational protests against them to produce a more general argument about how development visions can be transformed—even by actors who seem powerless. In his broadly constructivist analysis, Khagram traces the impact of changing norms not just on visions but also on concrete global practices of development, especially the sharp drop in the number of dams completed in the last two decades of the twentieth century.

Dams and Development: Transnational Struggles for Water and Power

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Practices of Citizenship in East Africa : Perspectives from Philosophical Pragmatism

The communication of science to science users is evolving to an approach that translates knowledge to targeted audiences. Under this evolution, knowledge brokers play an increasingly important role and users help ‘pull’ the required science to meet a policy or management imperative. To do this effectively, more insight is required into the knowledge seeking behaviour of science users and practitioners. The findings from a series of interviews that identify the science needs of Ontario’s Conservation Authorities (CAs) are presented. Results indicate that emerging functions, such as source water protection and integrated water resource planning, require more science input than mature functions. Senior CA officials view personal communication with their knowledgeable staff as the most used, accessible, trustworthy, relevant, shared, and preferable source of science information. While the internet and media were considered highly accessible, they were not viewed as trustworthy. We found no relationship between CA size and science use. Further research is needed to identify where junior and intermediate CA staff obtain their science knowledge from and whether this varies as a function of CA size. Our findings will be of interest to both policy/program communities and science providers.

Science-Seeking Behaviour of Conservation Authorities in Ontario

This paper argues that international development research should be submitted to the oversight of research ethics committees from the countries where data will be collected. This includes research conducted by individuals who may fall outside the jurisdictions of most ethics guidelines or policies, such as individuals contracted by non-governmental organizations. The argument is grounded in an understanding of social justice that recognizes that not seeking local ethics approval can be an affront to the decolonization movement, and may lead to significant direct harms to participants. Local ethics oversight can help ensure projects appropriately take into consideration local laws, regulations, priorities and context. For example, a local research ethics committee may be in a better position than a foreign one to assess whether any given proposed project carries context-specific risks. In addition, submitting to a local research ethics committee is to acknowledge the legitimacy of local authorities, thereby taking a stance against the history of colonizing disempowerment. Local oversight is a mechanism to increase the accountability of researchers working abroad: if respect for local authority and tailoring to local context are to be upheld, there must be mechanisms to ensure that research that does not meet these requirements does not proceed. Objections based on the limited oversight capacity in some countries and on concerns related to the politicization of the review process are discussed. Finally, the roles and responsibilities of the various stakeholders in the implementation of greater local ethics oversight are laid out.

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The Case for Local Ethics Oversight in International Development Research

This paper argues that the theoretical contributions of Karl Polanyi can provide a compelling foundation for the analysis of community development (CD) processes and cases. Through a review of the international theoretical and empirical literature in CD the paper demonstrates that CD scholars work with concepts such as social solidarity, agency, self-help and mutual help, social capital, and reciprocity, that can be effectively understood in Polanyian terms. CD scholars explain the emergence of CD as a response to “modernization” where communities seek to mitigate the impacts of modernization while also taking advantage of its promises to improve communities and livelihoods. Also CD normative actions are explained in terms of building – and rebuilding – social capital in response to the erosion of communities caused by modern forces such as the nation-state and industrial capitalism. CD scholars borrow from social analysts such as Jurgen Habermas, Paulo Freire, and Anthony Giddens to structure their explanatory and normative writing. But Polanyi is notably absent as a conceptual source in the CD literature. We argue that Polanyian concepts of the double movement, social disembeddedness, reciprocity institutions, and fictitious commodities can offer conceptual benefits to CD studies. For instance, Polanyi’s faculty for coherently defending the social and cultural spheres by using the language of institutional economics provides new perspectives that can induce new analyses of CD processes.

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Community Development as Double Movement

Introduction Since 1962, Julius Nyerere, leader of TANU (Tanganyika African National Union) (1) started to articulate a philosophy of national development perceived to be more appropriate for newlyindependent African states. Rural development, in that philosophy, was the back-bone of economic development to Tanzania. Ujamaa, his version of 'African Socialism' (2), focused on national self-reliance by means of government leadership, technical support for rural cooperatives and self-managing rural communities, with focus on agricultural production and education. Equity and productivity were central to the Ujamaa philosophy. Many aspects of appropriate technology and participatory development, widely studied in the world today, can be traced back to early writings on Ujamaa. In October 2009, the UN General Assembly named Nyerere 'a world hero of social justice.' However, whether Ujamaa succeeded in reality in Tanzania, or has been adopted and modified by other developing countries, is arguable. Although relatively ample research had been done on Ujamaa, from many aspects, most of that research was during the implementation years of Ujamaa (early or late). As Ujamaa moved to steps of implementation, it drew the attention of many researchers and development agencies worldwide. The implementation period that merited due attention covered two Five-year plan periods, the first from 1968 to 1973 and the second from 1973 to 1978 (Boeson et al. 1977). Foreign as well as local researchers took early interest in Ujamaa and attempted to study the scheme as it evolved. (3) Some of the foreign researchers were prompted to visit Tanzania, choose villages and districts for case studies and observe their story with Ujamaa as it unfolded through the following years. Freyhold (1979) and her study team traced the introduction of Ujamaa in different contexts (several villages from the district of Tanga). The study aimed to analyze the response of peasants and government staff to the new rural program. Boeson et al. (1977) presented a similar study to Freyhold's, in many aspects, with the West Lake Region as their case study. The latter however took a larger look at the institutional impacts of Ujamaa in the villages by looking at three indicators: (1) the capability of becoming socially and economically viable, (2) signs of a transformation process towards cooperative organization of production, and (3) establishment of democratic procedures. (4) Raikes (1975) and De Vries (1978) presented a political-economic analysis of the progress of Ujamaa implementation during its peak years. Kjekshus (1977) demonstrated, though historical analysis and arguments of rural planning, the centrality of the Ujamaa policy, and its villagization component, to the Tanzanian development strategy. Croll (1979) assessed the experience of women in rural regions under selected socialist regimes, which are the USSR, China, Cuba and Tanzania. Croll's study is of high value for its comparative look at schemes of similar characters as mentioned before in the paper, besides the improvement of women status that has been set early by Nyerere himself as one of the two most indicators of the progression of Tanzania from the traditional African social system to one of a modern socialist country. Biersteker (1980) assessed Tanzania's entire approach to self-reliance (and not just the Ujamaa scheme) by giving definitions to self-reliance and arguing of how it could be translated into policies of development. Biersteker then assessed Tanzania's performance against measures of self-reliance policies, concluding that, while much work was yet to be done, indicators of increased self-reliance can be demonstrated by data and profiles of exports/imports, trading relations with developed and developing countries, and domestic economy and market performance. (5) Hyden (1980) took the experience of Ujamaa as a benchmark case study for understanding African development questions from an African point of view and not a Western point of view. …

http://www.jpanafrican.org/docs/vol8no1/8.1-9-Ujamaa.pdf

Ujamaa: Planning and Managing Development Schemes in Africa, Tanzania as a Case Study

Technology localization refers to activities that seek to make particular technologies locally functional and locally embedded in order to overcome resistance to their adoption. These activities ca...

Gussai H. Sheikheldin

Papers

Science-Seeking Behaviour of Conservation Authorities in Ontario

The Case for Local Ethics Oversight in International Development Research

Community Development as Double Movement

Ujamaa: Planning and Managing Development Schemes in Africa, Tanzania as a Case Study

Agents of Technology Localization in East Africa: Case Studies of Social Enterprises in Tanzania