Dam Projects, Modernity, and Forced Displacement: An Analysis of the Role of Local Institutions in Surviving Marginalization Among the Tokwe Mukosi Displacees in Zimbabwe

This chapter is a product of the broader qualitative and ethnographic study carried out among the Tokwe Mukosi internally displaced persons (IDPs) at Chingwizi. This followed the construction of the largest inland dam project in Zimbabwe. It acknowledges that owing to the social, political, and economic impediments afflicting Zimbabwe, the state has reneged on the international imperatives for the protection of IDPs. These include but are not limited to the United Nations Guidelines on IDPs and the Kampala Convention on the Protection of IDPs. The disregard for these obligations is also an outcome of the spirited desire for modernity, rationality, and quantitative development. This has unintentionally led to the unintended consequence of “development eluding people". This chapter shows how the Tokwe Mukosi people are falling back on the existing local institutions for protection, simultaneously portraying how they create new local institutions to build resilience with very limited state support. The findings reveal the interplay between local institutions and social capital in understanding the efficacy of informal and community-based institutions in dealing with vulnerability and marginalization. This chapter interfaces social capital theory and strategic essentialism to understand the collective response of the displacements in the quest to survive marginalization. Methodologically, unstructured interviews, key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and secondary sources of data were used to collect data within this ethnographic study.