Inge Wagemakers

• Doctor in Development Studies
• University of Antwerp

Africa is increasingly confronted with the commercialization of its space. Whereas attention mainly goes to macro-scale land grabs, land contestation and grabbing at the micro scale are largely ignored. This paper analyses how local actors instrumentalize the renegotiation over African wetland rights to call into question the prevailing social orde...

This article argues that state (re)construction and functioning involves negotiated governance between both state and non-state actors, in which power relations between local actors are not just implicitly present or co-influencing policies but are of uttermost importance to the formation of policy and state. One of the main nonstate actors in Afri...

This paper analyses the interaction between daily local urban governance and an external aid programme in a peri-urban municipality of Kinshasa. It seems extremely difficult for the programme to influence local governance dynamics, because of the way the programme is set up but also because of the specific way in which local urban governance functi...

The school being one of the most important ‘faces’ of the state at the local level in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, investment in education can play an important role in reconstructing the social contract between the population and the state after violent conflict. However, this is particularly difficult since the state has largely retreate...

In many rapidly growing African cities, urban agriculture is of increasing importance for the provision of food for the population. At the same time, the larger a city grows, increasingly fewer areas of land are available for agriculture. This is a contradiction many African cities are struggling with. Also, in Kinshasa (our area of study), a strug...

Due to rapid expansion of the city and high demographic pressure, space in Kinshasa is scarce and conflicts over urban land are very present. Also, what was meant to be urban agricultural land is threatened to become residential space. In this chapter we describe the land conflicts on an urban vegetable gardening site in Kinshasa, where at present...