Performative Patronage, Hybrid Authority, and the Making of Migrant Tenure in Zimbabwe’s Peri-Urban Frontier

This paper examines how peri-urban migrants in Lydiate informal settlement in Zimbabwe, secure and sustain land tenure in the absence of formal property rights. Challenging dominant policy assumptions that equate tenure security with titling and state recognition, the study shows that security is produced as negotiated recognition within a hybrid governance order where political patrons, migrant-traditional leaders, and community institutions compete to authorize claims. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork combining participant observation and in-depth interviews, the analysis demonstrates that migrants stabilize occupancy through intertwined strategies: (i) performative patronage, where visible enactments of ruling-party loyalty convert political legibility into protection from eviction; (ii) customary and quasi-customary authority, where locally elected maSabhuku allocate land and adjudicate disputes; and (iii) community-based documentation, notably the “community book,” which functions as a de facto tenure record and evidence in everyday adjudication. These practices reveal that informal settlements are not governance voids but politically organized tenure regimes in which rights are conditional, relational, and repeatedly renewed through moral reputation, reciprocity, and public compliance. The paper contributes a sharpened conceptualization of performative patronage as a key mechanism linking partisan visibility to land security, and it extends debates on everyday governance and legal pluralism by showing how property and authority are co-produced on peri-urban margins. Policy implications caution against purely documentary formalization approaches and call for adaptive tenure strategies that engage existing recognition infrastructures while reducing political arbitrariness and vulnerability to speculative displacement.