Botswana, a middle-income country, is experiencing a sluggish economic growth and a rapid urbanisation which has brought in its wake high unemployment, poverty and food insecurity. This has led some people to engage in subsistence and commercial urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) to address these problems. However, in spite of its known advantages, uptake of UPA has been low for a number of reasons including: high GDP before the economic meltdown of recent years; a harsh climate; lack of water; poor access to land; and over-reliance on generous government handouts. Nevertheless, the extent of its practice and its contribution to food security – albeit modest – shows that it is a sector that needs to be encouraged and supported. Both central and local government can play a big role by providing land and infrastructure, and also by implementing an enabling policy and regulatory environment which promotes small- and medium-scale urban food production.

This paper examines the problem of integrating traditional rulers into the contemporary local government system in Nigeria with a view of resolving the problems arising from the tradition/modernity nexus in the present scheme. Two basic questions guided this work. The first relates to the relevance of indigenous traditional institutions to the challenges of contemporary democratic processes. The second relates to whether traditional modes of thought, behaviour and institutions constitute resources or impediments to the projects of modernisation and development. This paper concludes that the goal of modernisation is to generate rapid increase in social wealth and its driving force is economic development; and where traditional institutions are able to contribute positively to this goal, their input should not be jettisoned.

The paper examines capacity building in Zimbabwe’s Rural District Councils (RDCs) from 1994 to 2001 and the resultant erosion of capacity during Zimbabwe’s protracted political and economic crisis that followed. It is prudent to ask whether there was ‘capacity building’ or ‘capacity erosion’. The paper establishes that the capacity building was piecemeal and that there was no genuine desire to build capacity, but that Councils embarked on these programmes to access the funding that came with the programmes. In some cases, the design of the Rural District Councils’ Capacity Building Programme (RDCCBP) was too rigid, derailed by the central government’s half-hearted attempts towards decentralisation, and failed to allow RDCs to learn-by-doing. Because of Zimbabwe’s politico-economic crisis, national level politicians were peremptory in their demands for better RDC results and an opportunity to learn was lost. The plethora of other rural development projects coupled with the project-based approach of the RDCCBP condemned capacity building efforts to the rigidities of projects and programmes, yet capacity building is better perceived as a continuous process with experiential learning. The paper concludes by arguing that capacity building efforts in RDCs were largely unsuccessful, and were derailed by the ‘Zimbabwe crisis’; the result can only be described as ‘capacity building that never was’. Internal efforts by RDCs to build their own capacity are more sustainable than efforts prompted by the ‘carrot and stick’ approach of external actors, such as central government (in a bid to ‘hive off’ responsibilities) and funding agencies.