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Paper short abstract:

This study illuminates how Harare’s residents’ associations, using multipronged contentious and non-contentious institutionalized and non-institutionalized tactics and action repertoires, acted as countervailing agents to ZANU (PF)’s dominance and control over Harare’s local governance (1997-2017).

Paper long abstract:

The center-local tensions in Harare’s local governance; ZANU (PF)’s political onslaught of opposition-led councils; and its use of patronage, coercion and political chicanery to retain its hegemony in Harare post- 2000 has been well documented (McGregor 2013, Kamete 2006). However, there is an empirical lacuna on urban citizen agency to counter and/or respond to ZANU PF hegemony, which this study rectifies. This study argues that Harare’s residents’ associations’ claims, tactics, grievances, mobilizing discourses, and action repertoires were more complex, differentiated, spatially dispersed and multi-scalar geographically than conventional urban movement, right-to-the-city and urban citizenship literature suggests. It illuminates Harare’s urban activists’ use of less contentious forms of protest such as the ‘electoral option’ (McAdam and Tarrow, 2011), participatory and persuasive approaches, cultural forms of expression and other ‘localized’ grassroots oriented forms of “everyday resistance” (Scott, 1985) in their pursuit for equitable and efficient public service delivery and accountable democratic governance in Harare. The study looks at an extended period of activism (2003-2017); and thus speaks back to (i) snapshot research that tends not to ground analyses in strong understandings of temporalities, (ii) localized and particularistic urban-centric research that underplays, overlooks and/or discounts urban activists’ interactions and protest actions outside the urban/city realm and (iii) research that tends to be pre-occupied with particular forms of resistance. The study supports the viewpoint that local (urban) grievances (and the concomitant mobilizations) often emanate from and/or are interconnected to systemic processes that traverse the urban/city as argued by Nicholls, (2008), Miller and Nicholls, (2013).