Chisumbanje Ethanol Plant : Institutional frameworks and implications for land use of public private sector development initiatives on the rural communities in Chisumbnje.

Abstract: It is accepted institutions and the parameters they create are important facets in development planning. Organizations then lobby policy makers and manoeuvre their resources in response to the attendant restrictions, perceived benefits and censures. This paper seeks to examine the formal and informal context of planning in Zimbabwe. Through a series of interviews with civil servants at state, provincial and municipal level the role of the state and its agencies as initiators and guarantors of the various development frameworks post-independence in Zimbabwe-in tandem with a traditional leadership devoid of all but ceremonial powers is examined in the case study of the Private Partnership, Chisumbanje and the ethanol power plant. It is evident that fissures existed as a deliberate act borne out of the Rhodesian elites ideological aspirations of separate development vis a vis land rights, customary and rule of law, these have been exploited by post-independence regimes in pursuit of self-interests. The culpability of the political organization in the deliberate use of archaic exclusionary and disenfranchising legal instruments in complicity with International capitals has manifested in skewed development in local communities. Physical Planning and its noble intentions of sustainable development for the benefit of both individuals and societies and for future generations are systematically politicized rendering it a mere puppet lacking professional legitimacy an epitaph to politics and their pre-eminence in the Zimbabwean planning paradigm