Agrarian changes in the Nyimba District of Zambia

Over the past decade issues pertaining to land sharing/land sparing have gained some space in the debate on the study of land-use strategies and their associated impacts at landscape level. State and non-state actors have, through their interests and actions, triggered changes at the landscape level and this report is a synthesis of some of the main findings and contributions of a scoping study carried out in Zambia as part of CIFOR's Agrarian Change Project. It focuses on findings in three villages located in the Nyimba District. The villages are located on a high (Chipembe) to low (Muzenje) agricultural land-use gradient. Nyimba District, which is located in the country's agriculturally productive Eastern Province, was selected through a two-stage process, which also considered another district, Mpika, located in Zambia's Muchinga Province. The aim was to find a landscape in Zambia that would provide much needed insights into how globally conceived land-use strategies (e.g. land-sharing/land-sparing trajectories) manifest locally, and how they interact with other change processes once they are embedded in local histories, culture, and political and market dynamics.