| This dissertation presents a comparative study about the changing nature and use of informal relations and institutions---the contested domain of culturally embedded practices, norms, and values---in conservation and development. It illustrates how informal institutions matter and under what circumstances they lend themselves toward fulfilling the goals of---resource management, community empowerment, and equitable material development in Botswana's Okavango Delta and Zambia's Eastern Province.;The dissertation argues that the infusion of market and state logics is often incomplete and older logics of social organization can become the raw materials for the creation of new institutional practices. Market integration, in a context of state withdrawal or decentralization of decision-making, generates new relationships among community, market and state actors, has diverse impacts on collective action arrangements, social exchange patterns, and nature and mobilization of social trust.;By contrasting the trajectories of state building and consolidation, the dissertation traces divergent local institutional responses to imposed market driven and community centered resource management strategies. The continuities in Botswana's statist developmental project contrasts with the discontinuities in Zambia. With its blend of developmentalism evident in a reasonably well managed national economy that relies on diamond wealth and authoritarian tendencies, Botswana's high-modernist state tends to encapsulate and capture local practices under official ideologies of development thus stifling of local empowerment at least in the short-term. State building in Zambia initially exemplified its official ideology of "humanism" has in recent years has regressed into a factionalized unstable multi-party system. Following the implementation of structural adjustment policies, informal relations are increasingly important to solve collective problems and community approaches provide an opportunity for local improvisation. But in the absence of an effective state they tend to captured and manipulated by local elites.;The findings presented in this study engage recent scholarship that from a variety of variety of epistemological and methodological perspectives has re-converged on informal institutions and deepens our theoretical understanding of the social embeddedness of the state (and also the market). At the same time, the articulations evident in this work between formal and informal institutions helps us specify the precise ways in which culture and tradition bound choice and preference formation. |
