First published in 1997, this volume is intended to make a contribution to both the literature and the contentious debate on the relationship between structural adjustment and reconstruction and development in Africa, as seen from the multidisciplinary perspective of academics and practitioners working in Africa on African development problems and issues. The implementation of structural adjustment in Africa has spawned a considerable, and still on-going, debate with vociferous advocates on both sides of the issue, particularly with respect to the efficacy of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) as an antidote to Africa’s development crisis. This book contributes to that debate with a rich mixture of analytical views and ideas covering a wide range of countries and sectors on the role and impact of structural adjustment programmes on the process of reconstruction and development in Africa.

Providing overviews of states and sectors, classes and companies in the new international division of labour, this series treats polity-economy dialectics at global, regional and national levels. This volume in the series looks at the complexities of structural adjustment in Africa.

Analyses the origins and assesses the impact of Zimbabwe's economic structural adjustment programme (ESAP) between 1990 and 1995. Includes chapters on economic development, educational and health policies in the country for the period 1980-1990.

This report summarises the results of work at the Nordiska Afrikainstitutet/Nordic Africa Institute (NAI) on the impact of structural adjustment implementation on the economies, states and societies of sub-Saharan Africa. It consists of two essays and an appendix listing research projects which have been/are being carried out under the auspices of NAI. The first essay raises a series of conceptual and methodological questions in the context of a presentation of some of the main empirical results obtained from extended field work carried out during the course of 1992 and 1993 in Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. The second essay presents the three main themes - private trading networks and structures, the changing political economy of land, and popular forms of social provisioning - that constitute the core of the second phase of NAI's structural adjustment research and, in so doing, provides a review of aspects of the adjustment literature. This report is, therefore, an attempt both at stock-taking and agenda-building as part of a wider quest for deepening our understanding of the structures and processes of socio-economic change associated with the crisis and adjustment years in contemporary Africa