Dr Mfundo Mlilo, Institute of Geography, University of Cologne
Wednesday, 3 June 2026
13:00 – 14:00 SAST
PLAAS seminar room, 2nd Floor, Jakes Gerwel Hall, UWC
Register for the in-person and online event via Zoom
Evolutionary economic geography (EEG) perspectives have become dominant in regional development research, particularly in explaining regional industrial change. However, concerns are growing about EEG’s relevance, as its core ideas largely rest on assumptions about highly industrialised, stable institutional settings in the Global North. Consequently, EEG offers only partial insights into the development and evolution of regional pathways in post-colonial Africa, where colonial histories and local knowledge systems are often overlooked. This neglect of colonial contexts and legacies has sparked increasing calls to “theorise back.”
This seminar addresses this gap through an exploratory case study of tourism development at Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. A decolonial EEG approach is proposed by integrating African gnosis and counterfactual reasoning into path analysis. The study makes three main contributions. First, it redefines colonialism as a key mechanism of structural economic change rather than just a background condition. Second, it shifts the EEG from merely explaining market evolution to a justice-oriented framework for shaping paths. Thirdly, it extends the concept of institutional proximity to include spiritual and ancestral connections
Bio
Dr Mfundo Mlilo is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Geography at the University of Cologne, working within the auspices of the DFG-funded Future Rural Africa Collaborative Research Centre. His work focuses on regional economic resilience in the Global South, with particular emphasis on East and Southern Africa.
