The study sought to evaluate the effectiveness of community participation in rural development projects in Zimbabwe testing the credibility of the popularized supposition that almost all contemporary development efforts characteristically embrace local participation. Public participation is widely assumed to be an essential ingredient for the fruition of rural development efforts. The research made use of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies in which unstructured interviews, focus group discussions and questionnaires were used as data gathering instruments. The analysis of data was enabled by the use of People-Centered Development (PCD) as a conceptual framework. Findings revealed that the level of community participation in the district is not only minimal, but it is also top down. This has much to do with the negative perceptions by facilitating agents viewing local people as passive recipients of externally crafted models of development and other factors such as the power dynamics within and between the community and other stakeholders. The research also found preferential treatment of other tribal groups by the facilitating agent, intra group conflicts and bureaucratic and political influence as obstacles militating against effective participation. Based on these findings, and consistent with the wider literature, recommendation are that the nature of community engagement should be based on the principle of equal partnership among all stakeholders as this would encourage full cooperation and thus effective participation.

The essay is an anatomy of the interface of disaster management and development, with the aim of drawing a framework for understanding how and why outright development strategies should mainstream disaster management as an elementary ingredient for sustainability. It accounts for why developing countries should consider disasters as a developmental issue insofar as they suffer a double tragedy, that of being 'underdeveloped' and abhorrently vulnerable to disasters. The paper methodologically thrived on desktop research to find out and highlight multifarious case illustrations of the negative ramifications of disasters on development. The analysis proceeded within the theoretical lens of the structural and technocratic approaches to disaster management as conceptual framework. It was avowed that, indeed there is a convoluted relationship between disasters and development, and therefore was seen imperative to mainstream disaster risk management in development planning in order to ensure optimum development outcomes in the long run.

The paper explores the ramifications of globalisation as a process, ideology and a theory on the embryonic and apparent discrepancies in development status between and within nations. It illuminated on the socio-economic and political forces behind globalisation and the implications of that process on access to resources, exercise of political and economic power in international governance and the resultant asymmetrical relations between nations in the global village. This endeavour was enabled through a multi-perspective approach in which various macro and micro sociological theories defined the lens for analysis some which entails the New International Division of Labour theory and the World Systems' theory as they were intrinsically a function and agent for the materialisation of the process of globalisation. Methodologically, the paper adopted the qualitative comparative case study approach which perfectly ushered the opportunity to juxtapose intricacies of different events and outcomes of the lopsided international relations on development between nations in the global village. The paper maintained the notion that, globalisation was an ideological apparatus meant to mystify and veil the realities of exploitation dictated by the new world system yet positively skewed to the Industrialised World at the peril of the Developing Countries.

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