social continuity of local relationships in
land, and the moral continuity of society
itself.
The ambiguity of land use planning
As TFAP has discovered, these are formida-
ble obstacles. In addition to providing direct
material inputs, their strategy for imple-
menting an unpopular programme was to
create participatory institutions for local
development planning. TFAP selected target
villages and organised Land Use Planning
Committees at the village, ward, division,
and district levels of these areas of the
North Pare highlands. I attended 13 meet-
ings of Village LUPCs, two meetings of a
Divisional LUPC, and two meetings of the
District LUPC in 1997 and 1998.^18
TFAP designed the LUPCs to be participatory
institutions that could supplement and
enhance the planning and implementation
activities of the local government. Officially,
the role of the committees was “to further
the identification of environment-related
problems with villagers, to work out solu-
tions, and to supervise the implementation
of activities accordingly.”^19 Specifically, the
LUPCs developed SWC work plans, resolved
resource conflicts, and proposed by-laws
concerning village land use.^20 The develop-
ment agency’s demands for local participa-
tion and quick results set up a contradictory
situation in which supposedly ‘empowered’
local institutions found themselves power-
less. The political flaws in these new institu-
tions increased the ambiguity of resource
tenure in North Pare, and this creeping inse-
curity undermined the project’s search for
sustainable land use.
Each village committee was chaired by a
respected elder (usually male) and generally
consisted of five to eight men and women.
TFAP facilitators and government extension-
ists also attended meetings, and usually set
the agenda. Interactions among the commit-
tee members were informal and friendly
unless a government official attended a
meeting, in which case increased formality
imposed communicative rules.^21 At many
meetings, participants divided themselves by
gender and the men’s side dominated the
discussion. The women often functioned like
the chorus in a Greek tragedy, by replying in
unison with clucks and murmurs to the male
leaders’ statements.Each meeting opened with welcoming state-
ments by the committee chairman and a
“three kilo clap” (a common political ritual in
Tanzania and Kenya, in which participants
clap three times to open or close a meet-
ing). Once the meeting was convened, how-
ever, TFAP facilitators set the agenda. They
did not do this by force of personality or
because the village LUPC lacked issues to
discuss. TFAP facilitators dominated village
LUPC meetings because TFAP provided them
with lists of criteria by which the project
evaluated its progress. All village LUPC
meetings fed into bimonthly Divisional LUPC
and quarterly District LUPC meetings, so
most village committees spent their time
preparing for these meetings. TFAP pressed
the village LUPCs to quantify their activities
by reporting how many of meters of ter-
races were built in the village during a cal-
endar year, how many private tree nurseries
were established, and how many protection
markers were placed on riverbanks. The
TFAP facilitators therefore functioned to filter
out the villagers’ qualitative concerns (such
as a labor shortage, insecure land tenure, or
pest control), so that they could efficiently
fulfill their primary task of collecting quanti-
tative data. The villages rarely fulfilled proj-
ect expectations, so most committee meet-
ings turned into long discussions of why,
who to blame, and how to present these
failures to the Divisional and District com-
mittees. Committee members found meet-
ings frustrating because they spent so much
time finding explanations for their inability to
meet project expectations, which then gave
the meetings a negative tone.^22 In several of
the meetings that I attended, committee