School of Geography - Theses

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Type: PhD thesis × Start date: 2000 × End date: 2019 × Subject: Community development × Subject: Privatization ×

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    Privatisation and grassroots development in Zambia
    Macdonald, Kate ( 2002)
    The central principles of grassroots development are increasingly accepted within the international development community, but have so far failed to influence the design or evaluation of the powerful macro-policy agenda of privatisation. This research therefore aims to evaluate the impact of Zambia's privatisation program on 'grassroots empowerment', thus contributing a more comprehensive understanding of the effects of privatisation programs on development, and enabling their design to more effectively support the empowerment needs of grassroots stakeholders. The failure of past research to apply grassroots theory to the evaluation of privatisation policy can be attributed in large part to the serious analytical weaknesses afflicting current formulations of such theory. This thesis therefore begins by developing a normative and analytic framework of 'grassroots empowerment' that transcends existing theoretical limitations. This framework is then applied to an evaluation of Zambia's privatisation program, drawing both on qualitative interview-based data collected as part of this study in August- September 2001, and on quantitative data collected by both the Zambian Privatisation Agency and the World Bank. This research indicates clearly that privatisation has impacted at all levels of Zambia's socio-economic system, affecting individuals and communities far beyond the narrow groups of stakeholders generally acknowledged, and transforming the macro-structures through which these agents interact. Such changes have been empowering for many among the grassroots, enabling significant resource transfers to grassroots workers, firms and communities, and greatly expanding the range of business opportunities available to many grassroots firms. Others, however, have suffered diminished access to empowering resources and opportunities as a consequence of privatisation - particularly those workers and communities affected by large-scale redundancies. It is concluded that policy-makers, researchers, and non-governmental actors who support the agenda of grassroots empowerment must work towards the explicit incorporation of grassroots-oriented objectives into a range of policies designed both to assist negatively affected grassroots agents, and to target structural barriers to empowerment.