This chapter attempts to take stock of what has happened in Australian coastal management up to the end of 2001, particularly the major changes that took place in the 1990s, and comment on the prospects for managing the coast in the 21st century. The book has, so far, focused on four themes:

1. global imperatives for integrated coastal management and the Australian response

2. the need to understand biophysical coastal processes before attempting to find solutions for anthropogenic coastal problems in Australia

3. the scale and magnitude of human impact on the Australian coast which raises a number of generic management issues together with the need for localised or regional approaches to specific pressures on coastal resources

4. the complexity of coastal management in Australia, involving different roles for the Commonwealth, state, territory and local governments, together with community participation.

First, this chapter of the book examines the current state of coastal management in Australia and comments on selected recent international and national discussions which could produce further change. Some of these are global initiatives such as the Rio + 10 Coastal Conference which took place in Paris in December 2001, or national developments such as recent political discussions of the coastal elements of the future National Heritage trust (Mark II) Program for 2002 onwards. By the time this book hits the shelves, there should also be further comment on coastal management from the UNCED 2002 Conference in Johannesburg, as a follow-up to the significant ‘Earth Summit’ held in Rio de Janiero 10 years earlier.

The Australian coast and its thousands of beaches have an iconic status in the Australian culture and way of life. Most Australians live on or near the coast where there is continuing population and development pressure, particularly along non-metropolitan coastlines. There is also a heavy use of coastal resources and added pressure from recreational users. We need to understand how these activities affect coastal processes so that we can limit our impacts. If we can avoid changing the natural balance of processes as far as possible we are more likely to maintain the iconic status of the Australian coast.

There are some good examples where human impact on the Australian coast has been managed quite successfully but the mechanisms for coastal management vary considerably between the various state and territory governments. There have also been numerous coastal inquiries into how we manage the coast but by the turn of the century there was still no single comprehensive overview of Australian coastal management. In order to fill that void, this book was published in 2003. It has had favourable reviews and has been popular as a text.

The evidence presented in this book from Zimbabwe and many other countries across sub-Saharan Africa shows that the population dynamics of African urbanization have changed significantly. In comparison with the early postcolonial decades, the net impact of migration has reduced, and for some towns has even become negligible or occasionally even negative. In Zimbabwe, these changes can be traced in detail with reference to the changing responses and characteristics of in-migrants to its capital city, Harare, from independence in 1980 to the era of its economic collapse in the 2000s. As shown, the attractions of the city for migrants dwindled and their evaluation of the importance of, and future need for, rural economic links grew.

In this concluding chapter, the implications of these shifts will be discussed in relation to four themes. First, I consider the implications of these findings for the actors central to the book – migrants moving in and out of towns – and our understandings of their decision-making and livelihoods. Second, I discuss a range of issues relating to various theoretical and conceptual aspects of understanding migration and African cities and their economic functions, some of which have been addressed in the introductory chapters and are here revisited in the light of the evidence presented. Third, I relate the findings to some contemporary policy discussions about the role of migration and urbanization in development.

The acceleration in Zimbabwe's economic decline that set in after 2000 was triggered by various political events (see Chapter 4) which attracted much international attention because these set in train the occupation and expropriation of most of the country's formerly white-owned commercial farming land. The most immediate victims of the new ‘fast-track’ land reform programme were the hundreds of thousands of commercial farmworkers whose livelihoods were disrupted or destroyed, and the farms' owners who were evicted (Sachikonye 2003; Hammar et al. 2003). The urban economy and urban livelihoods also suffered terribly, adding to the setbacks of structural adjustment from 1991 and the budget-inspired economic crisis from 1997. Urban based production and output declined further, including the already much beleaguered manufacturing sector. Effective demand for agricultural inputs, much of which had been domestically produced for decades, fell sharply, which had a negative effect on the urban economy. International aid (except humanitarian aid which became increasingly necessary) and investment swiftly dried up, having already slowed after 1997. Access to loans from international financial institutions disappeared as the government defaulted on its various debts. Inflation soared and almost all effective management of the economy ceased.

In 1985, when the research upon which this book is based began, one pound was worth Z$1.6. At the end of July 2008, when writing this chapter, on the parallel market a pound was valued at one thousand trillion of the original Zimbabwean dollars. This extraordinary comparison provides perhaps the best introduction to the dramatic economic changes which are the backdrop to this chapter. It describes the national and urban contexts within which internal migration and urban livelihoods in Zimbabwe have developed since the country's independence in 1980.

From the 1980s to 1997, Zimbabwe passed through two economic policy phases. Although the timing was different, they broadly mirrored the post-colonial experience of other sub-Saharan African countries. In the decade 1980–90, the government pursued the general aims of modernization theory, assuming a central role in the economy and investing heavily in health and education. Economic sectors deemed key to the economy, such as commercial agriculture and manufacturing industry, continued to be encouraged by various policies, as they had under the colonial Rhodesian governments but so also were formerly, seriously disadvantaged sectors in which most citizens gained their livelihoods, particularly peasant agriculture. Import barriers operated to protect industries from external competition and there were foreign exchange controls.

What did Harare's migrants think about the city? The analysis so far has built up a picture of their livelihood characteristics and how these have changed over time. These are tangible and usually measurable factors. They are reflected in their plans for their futures which have already been outlined; they are also reflected in people's behaviour, attitudes and perceptions about their lives in the city. These issues are the core of this chapter, which explores migrants' experiences of Harare, and their views about the city. The findings are considered together with the migrants' understandings of how their livelihood options are affected by a variety of intersecting factors, including age, position in the household, housing, employment, rural assets and, in particular, gender.

As explained in Chapter 4, the surveys included qualitative explorations which picked up on unexplained issues from previous surveys, or explored particular current issues. Three of the surveys also included very simple, pre-coded questions asking respondents to compare Harare with their previous place of residence, in terms of the chance of getting a job and of how much money they could earn. In the final survey, which was conducted when the urban economy was in dire straits, this aspect of the research was greatly expanded and the migrants were asked, in addition, to compare standards of living in Harare with their previous place of residence, once various necessary expenditures had been taken into account.

Rural assets are only one of a wide range of factors which influence livelihood options and outcomes in Zimbabwe's urban areas. Education levels play a major part. Ownership of urban property is enormously beneficial. Family socio-economic status is crucial. Each of these factors is in its turn influenced by broad structural conditions and events, and their temporal intersection with an individual's life cycle. For example, finishing school with a reasonable set of results when the economy is faring well self-evidently provides better livelihood prospects than job-seeking in an era of formal job retrenchment and increasingly saturated informal sector markets. Managing to obtain rights to a legal urban property can be a life-transforming event. Seeking to establish a separate urban residence, whether one is urban or rural born, is more likely to yield a safe home and possibly productive asset when at least some formal housing projects are active and/or informal housing is tolerated rather than when national and global conditions dictate that virtually nothing is affordable or secure. In Johannesburg, for example, it has been shown that households who secured their housing in the early decades of apartheid, when formal townships were being established en masse, are in a far better situation than later entrants to the African housing market (Beall et al. 2006).

Introduction: The Dominance of Meta-narratives

Modernization & shattered expectations

A useful starting point for discussing the academic traditions of interpreting urbanization and migration in southern Africa is Ferguson's book, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt, from which the above two quotes are taken. This is because it not only provided a detailed explanation of how and why some of these academic traditions emerged, but also because it provided comprehensive evidence of how adherence to a model of modernization created an often exaggerated picture of transition to permanent migration during and in the early aftermath of the colonial period. One of Ferguson's primary purposes in the book was to examine the validity of ‘the dominant accounts of urban residence and worker mobility … [that] share an underlying metanarrative in which “migrant labor” is gradually replaced by “permanent urbanization”’ (ibid.: 40).

This book is about trends in migration to, and from, African towns and cities, and the changing characteristics of migrants and migrancy. To some extent, therefore, it is also about changing urban population dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa as an outcome of these shifts and the nature of urban livelihoods which is a key driver of migration. The core of the book is based on empirical evidence from longitudinal research in Harare, Zimbabwe. In the 1980s, ordinary residents of Harare were probably the most economically and socially secure urban people in sub-Saharan Africa. By the mid- 2000s, they were among the least secure. Over the same period most ordinary urban people in sub-Saharan Africa had suffered significant falls in their living standards, leading to adaptations in their livelihoods and the nature of migration (Potts 1997; Beall et al. 1999). Harare's experience provides in microcosm an extreme example of these falls and adaptations which can be traced through the evidence from directly comparable surveys conducted in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.

In 1984 I sent a research proposal on migration to Harare to Professor Chris Mutambirwa, Head of the Geography Department of the University of Zimbabwe. He responded with interest. Thus began a research collaboration which has been central to the development of my ideas and understandings of migration and urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa. In the following year, when our first project was undertaken, and during subsequent rounds of surveys of migrants and their livelihoods, and on many other occasions when I was in Zimbabwe, the Geography Department hosted and supported me. The results of that research form the core of this book and the context from which I have developed my broader analysis of cities and circular migration in sub-Saharan Africa. I should like to thank everyone involved in the department. I am also grateful to all the research assistants and interviewees involved in our surveys over the years; special mention must go to Ruth Masaraure. Above all, I am indebted to Chris and his wife Jane for their support and affection for both me and my family over the decades since our first correspondence all those years ago. In the 1990s and 2000s, often with my young children in tow, I could not have conducted my work in Harare without the hospitality and friendship of Richard and Lynette Owen.

Introduction

Chapter 1 established how circular migration in developing countries has been covered in general migration theory. This chapter and the next explore some of the ways in which it has been evaluated in sub-Saharan Africa and, in particular, how different academic approaches and theoretical positions have shaped these evaluations in different regions. The focus is on academic assessments in the postcolonial period, particularly from the 1970s, when changes in migration patterns facilitated by policy changes introduced at independence had become reasonably apparent in West, East and Central Africa, although not in southern Africa. At that point, four southern Africa countries (Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Rhodesia) had not achieved independence and, along with South Africa, remained under white settler rule. Three others, Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, achieved independence only in the late 1960s and were also so bound into the South African migrant labour system that their migration processes were still dominated by South African policy. The other two southern African countries, Malawi and Zambia, became independent in1964 and experienced similar policy changes to those further north. During the colonial period, the academic analysis of urbanization and migration in Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) had exerted influence over Anglophone urban studies throughout sub-Saharan Africa, due to the important urban-based anthropological studies of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI) based in that country.