TY - JOUR
T1 - Seamless imaginaries, territorialised realities
T2 - The regional politics of corridor governance in Southern Africa
AU - Zajontz, Tim
N1 - Funding Information:
This is not to say that cross-border corridors and the regional scale have been altogether neglected in Zambia’s state spatial strategy. Ultimately, landlocked Zambia and its copper-dependent economy heavily rely on access to seaports. Enclosed by seven neighbouring countries, Zambian territory is interlinked with several corridors (ending at Angolan, Mozambican, South African and Tanzanian ports) which compete for cargo flows. The competition of corridors that arises from this ‘geography of choice’ engenders further territorial logics, as corridors necessarily organize ‘economies, politics and social life around particular directional priorities’ (Newhouse & Simone, , p. 4). Such directional priorities are, for instance, set through political decisions for or against infrastructure funding for a particular corridor. As Lamarque (, p. 232) aptly underlines, ‘[c]orridors compete not only to be used, but also to be funded and built’. As part of the North–South Corridor, one of the continent’s priority corridors identified under the African Union’s Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA), both the rehabilitation of the trunk road between Kapiri Mposhi in central Zambia and the Tanzanian border as well as the Zambezi bridge in Kazungula, a key link along the southern corridor through Botswana, have received funding from the AfDB. The rehabilitation of the trunk road between Lusaka and Chirundu at Zambia’s border with Zimbabwe, along the Beira corridor, was co-funded by the World Bank (Zajontz, ).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2022/7/13
Y1 - 2022/7/13
N2 - Corridors are central to contemporary processes of spatial reordering. On the African continent, they feature prominently in development planning at national, regional and continental scales. This article sheds light on the regional politics and supranational governance of cross-border corridors, aspects that have remained under-represented in the burgeoning literature on corridors. Combining theoretical insights from the New Regionalism Approach and critical political geography and focusing on the ‘corridor agenda’ pursued by the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the article deconstructs dominant conceptions of corridors as archetypal spaces of flow and advances the argument that the spatial production and governance of cross-border corridors are contingent upon the compatibility of scalar and territorial articulations of state space. In the case of the Walvis Bay-Ndola-Lubumbashi Development Corridor, the incompatibility of Namibia’s decidedly regional ‘gateway strategy’ and Zambia’s (sub)national ‘pothole politics’ has yielded a connectivity patchwork. Efforts to institutionalise supranational corridor governance have been obstructed by state territoriality aimed at retaining political control over corridor space at the national scale. While commonly represented as spatial panaceas for attaining neoliberal meta-goals of global connectivity and seamless territorial integration, (trans)regional corridors are politically contested spaces that engender dialectical processes of de- and reterritorialisation at various scales.
AB - Corridors are central to contemporary processes of spatial reordering. On the African continent, they feature prominently in development planning at national, regional and continental scales. This article sheds light on the regional politics and supranational governance of cross-border corridors, aspects that have remained under-represented in the burgeoning literature on corridors. Combining theoretical insights from the New Regionalism Approach and critical political geography and focusing on the ‘corridor agenda’ pursued by the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the article deconstructs dominant conceptions of corridors as archetypal spaces of flow and advances the argument that the spatial production and governance of cross-border corridors are contingent upon the compatibility of scalar and territorial articulations of state space. In the case of the Walvis Bay-Ndola-Lubumbashi Development Corridor, the incompatibility of Namibia’s decidedly regional ‘gateway strategy’ and Zambia’s (sub)national ‘pothole politics’ has yielded a connectivity patchwork. Efforts to institutionalise supranational corridor governance have been obstructed by state territoriality aimed at retaining political control over corridor space at the national scale. While commonly represented as spatial panaceas for attaining neoliberal meta-goals of global connectivity and seamless territorial integration, (trans)regional corridors are politically contested spaces that engender dialectical processes of de- and reterritorialisation at various scales.
KW - regional corridor governance
KW - corridor space
KW - state spatial strategies
KW - Southern African Development Community (SADC)
KW - Namibia
KW - Zambia
U2 - 10.1080/21622671.2022.2092205
DO - 10.1080/21622671.2022.2092205
M3 - Article
SN - 2162-2671
JO - Territory, Politics, Governance
JF - Territory, Politics, Governance
ER -