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Paper short abstract:

The state's urge to re-territorialize space and displace communities from their lands is evident throughout the extractive logic that produces and reproduces unjust development futures. The study provides a political ecology lens to view how Zimbabwe's lithium mining shapes the everyday.

Paper long abstract:

In Zimbabwe's post-colonial state, natural resource frontiers have primarily mirrored a contentious terrain of political power consolidation and expressions of asymmetrical power dynamics between nature, society, and the state.The collaboration between the state, traditional leadership, private business, and extractive multinational companies has placed the local communities in a precarious position where they are vulnerable to exploitation and forced displacement. The state's urge to re-territorialize space and displace local communities from their lands is evident throughout the extractive logic that produces and reproduces unjust development futures and social-ecological catastrophes.

With an emphasis on lithium mining, the study aims to provide a decolonial and political ecology lens through which to view how Zimbabwe's climate-smart ('green' extractivism) ambitions and practices are materializing. Reflecting on the everyday practices, policies, and laws that are shaped by state power, capital, and violence is producing a new surge of ‘green’ authoritarianism and destructive neo-liberal developmentalism.

The following core question will direct this study: Do 'green' extractivism, neo-liberal developmentalism, and state power intersect to create and perpetuate geographies of marginalities and exclusions through green enclosures? If so, how?

The research attempts to counter the Western universality of knowledge hegemony by forwarding, countering, and reasserting African decolonial emancipatory scholarship in development studies. It will achieve this through a participatory scholar-activist approach and by trying to redefine neoliberal norms like development.

The study uses participatory decolonial methodologies to allow for a nuanced understanding of the extractive, ‘dispossessive’ histories and everyday realities of capitalist nature commodification.