This book contributes to academic debates on knowledge. A resettlement area with people resettling from different agro-ecological regions with different knowledge and approaches to agriculture and farming provides a fascinating area to investigate how knowledge is produced and socialised. The fact that the resettlement scheme became a melting pot of different knowledge makes the term 'local' problematic yet farmers still use and produce knowledge that is considered 'local'. Of interest is how the gender dynamics, politics, power, conflicts, resistance, religious beliefs and government policies impact on farming knowledge and on farming in general. This book unravels how local knowledge makes use of scientifically based state organised interventions. The book is of interest to policy makers and anyone involved in development studies.

Netsayi N Mudege is currently an Associate Research Fellow at the African Population and Health Research center in Nairobi Kenya. She works under the Urbanisation Poverty and Health Dynamics theme. She has a PhD in Social Science from Wageningen University and Research Center in the Netherlands and Masters Degree in Sociology and Social Anthropology from the University of Zimbabwe.

Before joining APHRC, Dr Mudege was a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe in the Department of Sociology where she taught a Masters class in Urbanisation and Development as well as undergraduate classes in Social Policy. Before that she was a part-time lecturer at the Women’s University in Africa also in Zimbabwe where she taught Rural Development and the Sociology of Race and Ethnic Relations.

Her research interests revolve around issues of urbanisation, poverty, rural development, migration, gender as well as aging.