This article analyses the dynamic interactions between civil society organisations, local government, and the energy sector within three key energy-producing regions of Mozambique: Inhambane, Tete, and Cabo Delgado. It focuses on the challenges and opportunities for achieving a just energy transition in a political landscape prioritising investments in an energy matrix predominantly based on hydroelectric power, natural gas, and coal. Drawing on research in Mozambique on civic engagement and energy transition, the article puts forward three main propositions: (1) Mozambique's dependency on fossil fuels and the slow expansion of renewable energy projects creates tensions between the urgent need for energy access and global climate mitigation commitments; (2) the fragmentation of civic space limits the ability of local voices to influence policy decisions around transition; (3) the creation of democratic engagement platforms would expand community participation and foster strategic alliances to address the rights of local communities.

This article analyses the dynamic interactions between civil society organisations, local government, and the energy sector within three key energy-producing regions of Mozambique: Inhambane, Tete, and Cabo Delgado. It focuses on the challenges and opportunities for achieving a just energy transition in a political landscape prioritising investments in an energy matrix predominantly based on hydroelectric power, natural gas, and coal. Drawing on research in Mozambique on civic engagement and energy transition, the article puts forward three main propositions: (1) Mozambique’s dependency on fossil fuels and the slow expansion of renewable energy projects create tensions between the urgent need for energy access and global climate mitigation commitments; (2) the fragmentation of civic space limits the ability of local voices to influence policy decisions around transition; and (3) the creation of democratic engagement platforms would expand community participation and foster strategic alliances to address the rights of local communities.

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MotivationAid agencies that support public accountability reforms commonly do so in the same places and with similar state and civil society actors. However, the combined effects of their separate programmatic actions are rarely analysed. PurposeThis study departs from conventional analysis of aid agency relationships that focuses on the macro level of donor co-ordination and harmonization. Instead, we look at the interactions that happen in practice between aid agency programmes on the ground. Through doing so we propose a new conceptual lens for understanding these interactions. Methods and approachWe explore how programmes with overlapping public accountability goals interact in specific locations and with what effects, based on qualitative fieldwork on four recent programmes that overlapped in sub-national areas of Pakistan and Nigeria and supported by lighter-touch research on two programmes in Mozambique. FindingsWe identify three distinct categories of "interaction effects"-synergy, parallel play, and disconnect. These effects came about both with and without direct engagement between the aid agencies themselves. Synergistic interaction effects-aid agency actions reinforcing one another in pursuit of greater public accountability-were common. Parallel play-siloed working-was also common, risking missed opportunities to extend impact. The study identified one outright disconnect-where aid agency actions undermined each other. Policy implicationsUsing this "interaction effects" lens in practice could inform and strengthen aid agency strategies-avoiding conflicting actions and siloed working-and achieving more through synergy with others, particularly in complex contexts. This applies both in programme design and in adapting to other aid programmes' actions in real time. Development programme research and evaluations would benefit from broadening their lens beyond single-programme studies to understand the combined effects of multiple actors.

their prompt and helpful responses to our queries as we navigated unexpected challenges and the complexities of completing this ambitious research process within a very

Energy protests are becoming increasingly common and significant around the world. While in the global North concerns tend to centre around climate issues, in the global South the concerns are more often with affordable energy. Both types of protests, however, have one issue in common: the undemocratic nature of energy policymaking. This paper draws together findings from research conducted in three countries, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Pakistan to ask how and under which conditions do struggles over energy access in fragile and conflict affected settings empower the powerless to hold public authorities to account? In exploring this theme, the study examines what factors support protests developing into significant episodes of contention within fragile settings, and whether these energy struggles promote citizen empowerment and institutional accountability.

Agricultural development corridors and clusters are highly complex projects that have been driven in Africa by agribusiness and mining corporations, host governments, international donors and development finance institutions. There is interest in whether these projects can support inclusive agribusiness. Evidence shows that involvement of small-scale economic actors in such initiatives is often impeded by a failure to grant them participation or a voice. We therefore investigated if and how recent corridors and clusters in Africa have been able to achieve the meaningful engagement of small-scale economic actors, with a focus on smallholders, including pastoralists, and the women among them.

Abstract Translated from the Portuguese expression arquivo morto, the dead archive is a site where files that have lost their procedural validity are stored for a determined number of years before they are destroyed or are sent to permanent archives. In Mozambique, where awareness and institutional capacity for proper archival procedures are still being developed, a common feature of the dead archive is the way in which files are untidily piled up with old typewriters, furniture, spare parts and other material debris of bureaucratic work and administration. In these archives, more than forty years of institutional and public memory lie ignored in leaky, damp basements across the country and in serious danger of irreparable damage. Drawing from various stints of historical and anthropological field research conducted between 2009 and 2016 in Maputo, Niassa and Inhambane provinces, this article examines the dead archive in order to explore the relationship between institutional memory and governance during the long period of austerity in Mozambique. Based on our investigation of the multiple layers of the dead archive, we argue that the Mozambican post-socialist government has sought to control institutional memory as a way to keep the ruling party in power in the context of multiparty politics. While the public sector has experienced conditions of austerity since independence, we show how, during the socialist period (1975–90) of single-party rule, the state's relationship with institutional memory was more progressive, with transparent and communicative archival practices. In contrast, despite the combination of public sector reforms and progressive legislation regarding the right to information, the multiparty democratic period (1990 to the present) has seen an exacerbation of administrative secrecy leading to less transparent and communicative archival practices.

In Mozambique, development programmes have traditionally drawn on music as a means to promote social transformation by educating citizens on key social development issues. Shifting the focus from music as a teaching medium to music as a rich source of information can provide vital insights into public opinion and political ideas, and significantly impact the development of citizen engagement projects. Maximum gains for development and civil society agencies can be achieved by mainstreaming gender into mutual learning activities between singers, audiences, and academics.

In much of Eastern Africa, the last decade has seen a renewed interest in spatial development plans that link mineral exploitation, transport infrastructure and agricultural commercialisation. While these development corridors have yielded complex results - even in cases where significant investments are yet to happen - much of the existing analysis continues to focus on economic and implementation questions, where failures are attributed to inappropriate incentives or lack of 'political will'. Taking a different - political economy - approach, this article examines what actually happens when corridors 'hit the ground', with a specific interest to the diverse agricultural commercialisation pathways that they induce. Specifically, the article introduces and analyses four corridors - LAPSSET in Kenya, Beira and Nacala in Mozambique, and SAGCOT in Tanzania - which are generating 'demonstration fields', economies of anticipation and fields of political contestations respectively, and as a result, creating - or promising to create - diverse pathways for agricultural commercialisation, accumulation and differentiation. In sum, the article shows how top-down grand-modernist plans are shaped by local dynamics, in a process that results in the transformation of corridors, from exclusivist 'tunnel' visions, to more networked corridors embedded in local economies, and shaped by the realities of rural Eastern Africa.

In the past decade, the Mozambican government has been mobilizing international capital to build and renovate transport infrastructure in the central and northern areas of the country, with the aim of creating agricultural corridors. Based on field research conducted in two districts along the Beira and Nacala corridors, I examine those occasions when international capital and national agricultural policy meet smallholders in the implementation of agricultural projects. This article offers a performative analysis of the constitution of agricultural corridors. I argue that agricultural corridors emerge on those occasions when international funders and investors, national elites, local bureaucrats and smallholders overstate the success of agricultural projects and constitute what I have termed 'demonstration fields'. Regardless of the implementation of blueprints, agricultural corridors gain spatial and temporal materiality from the performance of presenting agricultural projects as successful, such as at the unveiling of agro-related infrastructure, at agricultural fairs and on occasions involving smallholders' associations.

This study examines Mozambican popular music to investigate three questions: Are notions of empowerment and accountability present in popular music in Mozambique? If so, what can these existing notions of empowerment and accountability reveal about relations between citizens and state institutions in general and about citizen-led social and political action in particular? In what ways is popular music used to support citizen mobilisation in Mozambique? The discussion is based on an analysis of 46 protest songs, interviews with musicians, music producers and event promoters as well as field interviews and observations among audiences at selected popular music concerts and public workshops in Maputo city. Secondary data were drawn from radio broadcasts, digital media, and social networks. The songs analysed were widely played in the past two decades (1998–2018), a period in which three different presidents led the country. Our focus is on the protest song, conceived as those musical products that are concerned with public affairs, particularly public policy and how it affects citizens’ social, political and economic life, and the relationship between citizens and the state.

This chapter describes how the political-economy of knowledge production in the continent has led African anthropologists to critically evaluate canonical expectations of the discipline such as long-term fieldwork, co-research, and forms of public engagement. It traces the historical arc of changing working conditions for scholars trained in anthropology who have been nationals of African countries and worked in national or local institutions in post-colonial Africa. The chapter briefly attends to the colonial period and the first two decades that followed independence. It highlights some of the key questions and concerns that were raised by African anthropologists, and in particular how they sought to exorcize the ideological and ethnocentric biases of a discipline that had reached its maturity in the colonial context and, in part, contributed to it. The chapter establishes the state of play that served as the point of departure for what has transpired during the “era of aid”.