Forging effective new communities: The evolution of civil society in Zimbabwean resettlement villages

This paper explores one process through which Zimbabwean farmers resettled at independence transformed their new co-villagers from strangers into neighbours. They invested in civil society. Two decades on, resettled villagers engage in twice as much civil social activity as nonresettled villagers and may have, thus, compensated for the lower incidence of kinship ties and greater ethnic diversity among neighbors. Within villages, the elderly are more active. These results suggest that development practitioners could influence the evolution of civil society within resettlements. But, the relative welfare effects of kin-based and civic-based social capital need to be established before they do so. (C) 2004 Published by Elsevier Ltd.