“Bring Back the Land”—A Call to Refocus on the Spatial Dimension of Zimbabwe’s Land Reform | Land Portal

Resource information

Date of publication: 
July 2015
Resource Language: 
ISBN / Resource ID: 
10.3390/land4020355
License of the resource: 
Copyright details: 
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article.

In this article, we argue that research on land reform in the nation of Zimbabwe has overlooked possibilities of integrating geospatial methods into analyses and, at the same time, geographers have not adequately developed techniques for this application. Scholars have generally been captured within the debate focused on the success or failure of the Zimbabwean land reform program, and have neglected to analyze what has occurred where during the process of “fast-track land reform”. To date, no extensive national dataset of land ownership change, and the effect of this change on land use planning strategies, has been developed within the scientific community. As a result, most publications, even very detailed and thorough ones, have been based on regional case studies, broad estimates, or on outdated, cross-referenced statistics. To overcome the lack of spatio-temporal data, we propose an analytic framework to map Zimbabwe’s fast-track land reform and its country-wide effects. It emphasizes the potential of geographic information systems and satellite remote sensing to provide an objective basis for future studies of the subject.

Authors and Publishers

Author(s), editor(s), contributor(s): 

Hentze, Konrad
Menz, Gunter

Publisher(s): 

Data provider

Geographical focus

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