Browsing by Author "Hornby, Donna"

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    Apartheid space and fractured power: Vicious cycles of poverty in Cornfields, KwaZulu-Natal
    (Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2010) Del Grande, Lisa; Hornby, Donna
    Apartheid space and fractured power: vicious cycles of poverty in Cornfields, KwaZulu-Natal A neglected area in the literature on structural poverty is changing land tenure relations and the disconnect with planning frameworks, which lock particular areas into ‘vicious’ cycles of poverty. These areas include some tribal authority, “black freehold” and land reform areas. In this paper, we focus on the case study of Cornfields, a black freehold area and an early land reform project. We argue that under apartheid black freehold areas became ‘special purpose places’, which, while facing forced removals, played the role of re-incorporating ‘surplus people’, and in the process created bases for localized authority that were not derived exclusively from either formal or tribal property systems. Land reform and the introduction of developmental local government further multiplied the sources of localized power, increasing conflict and eroding the community’s ability to act collectively to access national development plans, thus consolidating trajectories into deeper poverty.
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    Dynamics of social differentiation after land reform among former labour tenants in Besters, KwaZulu-Natal
    (2012) Hornby, Donna
    • Locate land reform in SA in changes in 1970s which ended “state activism in capitalism” and started the “moment of ‘globalization” • Global restructuring of capital has been accompanied by the “fragmentation” of classes of labour and intense struggles for survival and reproduction. • Petty commodity production, combining contradictory class positions of capital and labour, is prevalent and also contributes to this fragmentation • So does LR enable expanded petty commodity production or does it simply diversify the strategies of survival of these fragmented classes of labour?
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    Imithetho yomhlaba yaseMsinga: The living law of land in Msinga, KwaZulu-Natal
    (Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape, 2011) Cousins, Ben; Alcock, Rauri; Dladla, Ngididi; Hornby, Donna; Masondo, Mphethethi; Mbatha, Gugu; Mweli, Makhosi; Alcock, Creina
    This report describes the ‘living law’ of land in one part of Msinga, a deep rural area of KwaZulu-Natal. It presents research findings from the Mchunu and Mthembu tribal areas, where a three-year action-research project was carried out by staff of the Mdukutshani Rural Development Programme1. Launched in 2007, at a time when implementation of the Communal Land Rights Act of 2004 (CLRA) appeared imminent, the project aimed to gain a detailed understanding of land tenure in Msinga, facilitate local-level discussion of potential solutions to emerging problems around land rights, provide information on the CLRA to residents and authority structures and help generate ideas on how local people could engage with the new law.
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    The impact of land property rights interventions on investment and agricultural productivity in developing countries: a systematic review
    (Taylor & Francis, 2017) Lawry, Steven; Samii, Cyrus; Hall, Ruth; Leopold, Aaron; Hornby, Donna; Mtero, Farai
    We conducted a systematic review on the effects of land tenure recognition interventions on agricultural productivity, income, investment and other relevant outcomes. We synthesise findings from 20 quantitative studies and nine qualitative studies that passed a methodological screening. The results indicate substantial productivity and income gains from land tenure recognition, although gains differ markedly by region. We find that these effects may operate through gains in perceived tenure security and investment; we find no evidence for a credit mechanism. The qualitative synthesis highlights potential adverse effects. A conclusion emphasises the need for further research on interregional differences and on the role of customary tenure arrangements.
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    Leaping the fissures: Bridging the gap between paper and real practice in setting up common property institutions in land reform in South Africa
    (Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2002) Cousins, Tessa; Hornby, Donna
    New common property institutions (CPIs) were created in South Africa soon after 1994 to enable self-constituted groups of people a choice about how they wished to acquire, hold and manage land. They were to provide rural people with an alternative to individual freehold, tribal administration and other legal group ownership options. This form of CPI, created through the Communal Property Associations (CPA) Act 28 of 1996 (the Act), focused on local constitution making as the mechanism for constituting the group and for realising individual and collective self-determination. However, concerns about the viability of these new institutions were voiced within a month of the publication of the Act (Hornby 1996) and in time became an active discourse that declared them to be failing (LEAP 1999). This paper takes a hard look at the claim that these new common property institutions are failing and argues that there are no meaningful indicators against which assessments of success or failure can be made. It asserts that the tenure security of the group and its members should be the primary purpose of land reform CPIs, because secure tenure is the primary mechanism for reducing risk for vulnerable people and is the universal need of the group. Securing tenure of individual members of CPIs, rests upon the clarity and accessibility of procedures for the assertion and justification of property rights and institutional mechanisms for realising and enforcing these rights. Useful indicators of security then become the degree to which these procedures and mechanisms are known, accessible, equitable, clear, used, socially accepted, transparent and enforced. This in turn requires that CPIs are developed from adaptations of current local practices within a broader environment in which there is legal, institutional and technical coherence and support for this approach. Without an enabling legal, institutional and technical framework, the tenure security of members of CPIs will not be significantly improved. It is political choices that inform whether or not this will take place. The paper begins by analysing what the new CPIs were set up to do and the legal and political framework in which they were created. It goes on to reflect on lessons that the Legal Entity Assessment Project (LEAP) has drawn from assessing the situation of land reform CPIs. Using the focus of tenure security and drawing on lessons from tenure work in Africa, the paper then interrogates in depth how membership has been constituted in land reform CPIs and whether the institutional context in which they have been set up has provided adequate support. It concludes by asserting that community constitutions reflect ambiguous and contradictory definitions of membership without reference to local practices and institutions. The state has not supported CPIs institutionally, or acknowledged the importance of institutional linkages at local level or provided legal, institutional and technical coherence. This creates an indeterminacy that puts tenure for members at risk. The analysis leads to some practical suggestions for field and bureaucratic practices. It proposes that prescriptive requirements are replaced by an approach that enables groups to articulate current procedures and institutions, and uses the suggested indicators to achieve gradual adaptation towards greater equity. A framework such as that offered by the Land Rights Bill is needed to provide support for such an approach and thus broader legal and policy reform is necessary.
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    “Reproducing the social”: Contradictory interconnections between land, cattle production and household relations in the Besters Land Reform Project, South Africa
    (Routledge, 2019) Hornby, Donna; Cousins, Ben
    Land redistribution policy in South Africa emphasises commercial farming as the legitimate use of land. This production-oriented framework fails to take into account the intertwined but unstable relationship between the production of market value and social reproduction, and how this shapes social differentiation. Drawing on a case study of the Besters Land Reform Project in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, the paper shows that land and cattle are not simply moments in the production of beef but material and discursive resources in (re)making the social conditions of the household. Cattle are used in drawn-out ceremonies that occur in specific spaces and stitch together families and communities pulled apart by rising inequality, making land constitutive of identity and belonging as well as of capitalist value production. Until land reform policy recognises the multi-functionality of land and cattle, and the contradictory relationship between functions, agricultural production will be a limited indicator of “success” or “failure.”
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    A slipping hold? Farm dweller precarity in South Africa’s changing agrarian economy and climate
    (MDPI, 2018) Hornby, Donna; Nel, Adrian; Chademana, Samuel; Khanyile, Nompilo
    The paper investigates whether farm dwellers in the KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) province of South Africa are subject to a “double exposure”: vulnerable both to the impacts of post-apartheid agrarian dynamics and to the risks of climate change. The evidence is drawn from a 2017 survey that was undertaken by the Association for Rural Advancement (AFRA), which is a land rights Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), of 843 farm dweller households. Data on the current living conditions and livelihoods was collected on 15.3% of the farm dweller population in the area. The paper demonstrates that farm dwellers are a fragmented, agricultural precariat subject to push and pull drivers of mobility that leave them with a precarious hold on rural farm dwellings. The key provocation is that we need to be attentive to whether the hold farm dwellers have over land and livelihoods is slipping further as a result of instability in the agrarian economy? This instability arises from agriculture’s arguably maladaptive response to the intersection of structural agrarian change and climate risk in post-apartheid South Africa. While the outcomes will only be apparent in time, the risks are real, and the paper concludes with a call for agrarian policy pathways that are both more adaptive and achieve social justice objectives.
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    The social and cultural aspects of small-scale agricultural production in South Africa and the implications for employment-intensive land reform
    (GTAC, 2020-03-31) Hornby, Donna
    There is widespread agreement that Government interventions to support smallholders have often been poorly constructed (Khulisa, 2016; Aliber & Cousins, 2013) and have failed to produce positive impacts (Okunlola et al, 2016). There are many reasons for this assessment, including that government “… strategies to support smallholder farmers are not working as effectively and efficiently as needed to create systems change” (Khulisa, 2016: 26); that government characterizes smallholders as politically, socially and economically homogenous and as having the same potential to “emerge” along a linear path of commercialization (Cousins, 2013; Olofsson, 2019); and that an “elite capture” of government’s land reform and agricultural resources (Hall and Kepe, 2017) has resulted in a small number of farmers upgrading to high-tech, capital intensive, commercial production geared at formal markets, which reduces the resources available for maximizing household food producing practices and the supply of informal local markets (Drimie, 2016; ACB, 2017). It is also widely acknowledged that small scale farmers face a large number of constraints. In addition to sufficient suitable land, they face fencing shortages, theft, crop damage by livestock and a lack of herding labour (Shackleton 2019; Shackleton et al, 2019); increasing capital costs (Bryceson, 1996); limited market opportunities due to competition from large-scale agricultural and retail sectors (Andrew and Fox, 2005); soil erosion partly due to overgrazing (ibid), and water scarcity and unpredictable climate variation (Ortmann & Machethe, 2003). Small scale farmers in KwaZulu-Natal summarized their situation saying there is “too much competition! Too much competition!” (KZNDARD, 2018:10). This study aims to identify the key social and cultural aspects of small-scale agricultural production in rural South Africa and the policy implications for a programme of employment-intensive land reform. It forms part of a bigger study investigating how the promotion of a land reform programme centred on small-scale agriculture could generate a large number of employment, self-employment and livelihood enhancing opportunities. This includes the key characteristics and preconditions of successful small-scale farm producers. Employment for the purposes of the study is defined very broadly as: • Livelihood enhancing activities – including gardening and stock farming for own use • Family labour – specifically for agricultural purposes but excluding recipients of wages • Hired wage labour – including permanent, casual, part-time, piece jobs
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    Social reproduction of ‘classes of labour’ in the rural areas of South Africa: contradictions and contestations
    (Taylor & Francis, 2018) Cousins, Ben; Dubb, Alex; Hornby, Donna; Mtero, Farai
    Marxist agrarian political economy has focused largely on the problematic of accumulation and its politics, but the dynamics of social reproduction in rural contexts remain somewhat undertheorised. These are explored through consideration of empirical evidence from communal areas and land reform farms in South Africa. Key arguments advanced are that social reproduction in such contexts include the reproduction of distinctive forms of marriage, systems of kinship and community membership, as well as of property relations that are not characterised by private ownership. Much social reproduction occurs outside of (direct) market relations, but it is nevertheless deeply conditioned and shaped by the dynamics of the wider capitalist economy, including in relation to wage labour and small-scale agricultural production. As a result, social reproduction in rural areas involves contradictions, tensions and contestations, and these are often at the centre of local forms of politics. The wider significance of these findings is discussed, and it is suggested that similar dynamics may be at work across the Global South.
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    Will formalising property rights reduce poverty in South Africa’s ‘second economy’?
    (Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape, 2005) Cousins, Ben; Cousins, Tessa; Hornby, Donna; Kingwill, Rosalie; Royston, Lauren; Smit, Warren
    De Soto’s influential book The mystery of capital offers a simple yet beguiling message: capitalism can be made to work for the poor, through formalising their property rights in houses, land and small businesses. This approach resonates strongly in the South African context, where private property works well for those who inhabit the so-called ‘first economy’. Evidence from South Africa, however, suggests that many of de Soto’s policy prescriptions may be inappropriate for the poorest and most vulnerable in our society, and have negative impacts on their security and well-being. More attention should be paid to supporting existing social practices that have widespread legitimacy. Features of ‘extra-legal’ property regimes provide a key to the solutions: their social embeddedness; the importance of land and housing as assets that help to secure livelihoods; the layered and relative nature of rights; and the flexible character of boundaries. The entire legal and social complex around which notions of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ property are constituted needs to be interrogated more rigorously.