Governance for sustainability?: balancing social and environmental concerns in Harare
It argues that, in Harare, sustainability hinges very much on the role of the governance system, especially as it relates to urban poverty and the day-to-day survival of the urban poor. It is this role of urban governance that eventually manifests itself in the state of society, economy and the environment.
The paper goes on to examine urban governance in Harare as it relates to urban poverty and the natural environment and pitches this against the search for the sustainable urban development. The paper argues that the achievement of sustainable cities depends on holistic governance and specific but co-ordinated strategies to address urban poverty, urban economies and the urban natural environment.
The discussion concludes by suggesting that a system of governance which depends on "hooking" onto misunderstood fashionable concepts rather than definite policies and strategies ends up overemphasising one aspect at the expense of the others, resulting in a move away from sustainability.
In the case of Harare, this means that the governance process is often dominated by either the ‘environmental’ lobby, which posits the blame for environmental damage on the poor and calls for protection through criminalisation and regulation, or the ‘politicisation’ lobby, which claims that preservation policies go against the struggles for survival of the marginalised. Until the process itself is democratised and drawn from a broader base of stakeholders, it will remain impossible to resolve the conflict between society and nature. A strategy for achieving sustainability depends very much on the governance system appreciating, streamlining and reconciling issues of growth, survival and conservation.
