Traditional Authorities in Decentralised Public Administration: Hybrid Governance, Institutional Accountability and Rural Service Delivery in Zimbabwe

Abstract

Decentralised public administration in rural Zimbabwe depends on effective coordination between customary authorities, elected representatives, and administrative institutions, making the functioning of hybrid governance arrangements directly relevant to public governance, regulation, and law. Existing studies have examined the constitutional recognition of traditional leadership and the broader implementation of devolution, but ward-level evidence on how stakeholders perceive legitimacy, coordination failures, resource asymmetries, and accountability within everyday rural service delivery remains limited. This study aims to examine how chiefs, headmen, and village heads interact with councillors and rural district structures in supporting health, education, water, and infrastructure services in Wards 25--30 of Masvingo South. The empirical material consists of semi-structured interviews conducted between January and March 2026 with 38 purposively selected traditional leaders, councillors, rural district council representatives, extension officers, and community members, with thematic saturation reached before completing the full sample. Interviews lasting 25–40 minutes were conducted in English or Shona, transcribed and translated where necessary, coded inductively and deductively in NVivo 14, and analysed thematically through hybrid governance theory and institutional legitimacy, while member checking with 12 participants and peer debriefing were used to strengthen trustworthiness. The findings show that traditional authorities were perceived to convert culturally embedded legitimacy into community mobilisation, participation, and project ownership in clinic support, school-enrolment activities, borehole siting, infrastructure maintenance, and local dispute mediation. A second pattern concerns a legitimacy–resource mismatch in which customary actors were reported to carry substantial mobilisation and maintenance responsibilities while lacking corresponding fiscal authority, formal decision rights, and material support. A third pattern concerns mandate ambiguity and partisan pressure, which were perceived to generate bypassed procedures, competition over authority, delayed coordination, and weakened accountability between traditional leaders, councillors, and rural district structures. The study contributes to research on decentralised public administration by showing that hybrid governance operates as a negotiated administrative interface rather than a stable institutional settlement, and the findings may inform devolution policy, statutory clarification, inter-institutional coordination, and future comparative research in settings where customary and formal governance systems coexist.