ABSTRACT
This chapter adopts an historic and ethnographic approach to understanding the development of institutions for managing natural resources in Zimbabwe. It draws on in-depth research to explore the nature of moral-ecological rationality, which links individual action and collective action to consequences in the supernatural and natural world. The chapter illustrates the tenacity of local principles of conflict avoidance, negotiation and reconciliation in natural resource arrangements and suggests how these sit uncomfortably with the principles underpinning formal designed institutions. It illustrates how institutions are formed and change through conscious design and in the practices of everyday life, and how contrived arrangements must be naturalized and legitimized in reference to human and supernatural authorities. The chapter peels away the formal layers of resource management in one village to begin to reveal the complexity of institutional functioning and evolution. It highlights the role of ideology in the reification of social relations and the discursive naturalization of human action.
