Books and Book Chapters

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Africa's land rush: rural livelihoods and agrarian change
(James Currey, 2015) Hall, Ruth; Scoones, Ian; Tsikata, Dzodzi
This book is 'the most historically grounded, lucid and nuanced understanding to date of the complex political economy of the contemporary rush for land in Africa' according to Professor Adebayo Olukoshi, Director of of the United Nations Institute for Development. Africa's Land Rush explores the processes through which land deals are being made; the implications for agrian structure, rural livelihoods and food security; and the historical context for changing land uses. The case studies reveal that these land grabs may resonate with, even resurrect, forms of production associated with the colonial and early independence eras. Based on interviews with the investors, goverment, authorities, workers, outgrowers and smallholder farmers in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique and the Congo, the book depicts the striking diversity of such deals.
Agriculture, value chains and the rural non-farm economy in Malawi, South Africa and Zimbabwe
(Spinger Nature, 2019) du Toit, Andries
This chapter compares rural development in Malawi, South Africa and Zimbabwe, concentrating on agricultural value chains and their implications for the rural non-farm economy (RNFE). Based on detailed qualitative exploration, it is shown that value chains in Mchinji (Malawi) are predominantly local, with few impulses being generated for the RNFE. The commercialised farms that characterise Weenen (South Africa) are locally disembedded, thus not triggering local development. In Mazowe and Mazvingo (Zimbabwe), agriculture is linked to a thriving RNFE and to distant corporate players. This creates down- and upstream markets that are significantly more complex and diverse than in the Malawian and South African cases. Against this background, the author suggests that dense, locally embedded and externally connected networks that do not suffer from an overly unequal distribution of power are most conducive to rural development.
Annual report 2000
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2001) PLAAS
The Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) focuses on the land restitution and redistribution programmes initiated by the post-apartheid democratic state; land tenure reform; emerging regimes of natural resource management; rural livelihoods and farm-household production systems; chronic poverty and rural development; and processes of institutional restructuring and reorientation in support of land and agrarian reform in South Africa. The main activities of PLAAS are research, support to national policy development, training, post-graduate teaching, commissioned evaluation studies, and advisory and facilitation services. The university’s mission statement commits it to ‘responding in critical and creative ways to the needs of a society in transition’, and to ‘helping build an equitable and dynamic society’– commitments taken very seriously by staff at PLAAS. The year 2000 saw our researchers beginning to engage with policy on land and local government reform in a more public manner than in the past (when they tended to do so in ‘backroom’ and advisory roles), and to adopt a more adversarial stance towards government.
Annual report 2001
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2002) PLAAS
PLAAS continues to grow and to take on new projects and staff. This presents a number of challenges, not least of which is the sustainability of such growth. The year 2001 saw the completion of a twelve month-long ‘organisational change process’ which addressed key issues of institutional sustainability. This resulted in new governance and management structures, revised salary scales and conditions of service in line with those of the university, and staff contracts that offer a degree of security of tenure despite the vicissitudes of external donor funding. By the end of the year most of the new systems and procedures were in operation, bringing a sense of solid foundations and greater stability. One of our innovations was to cluster researchers and projects into ‘focus areas’ co-ordinated by senior researchers. We hope that this will facilitate more effective links between individual projects, encourage coherence in our research, training and policy engagement, and facilitate strategic planning. The five focus areas are: land reform; agro-food regimes; community-based natural resource management (CBNRM); rural governance; and chronic poverty and development policy. A major new focus for PLAAS in 2001 was the post-graduate teaching programme. Twelve students registered for the Post-Graduate Diploma in Land and Agrarian Studies, eleven completed the year, and three qualified to proceed to the MPhil. The teaching programme is carried out in collaboration with a number of other institutions and university teaching departments, giving it a truly multi-disciplinary character.
Annual report 2002
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2003) PLAAS
The year 2002 was an extremely busy one for PLAAS staff, and saw the initiation of many new projects and activities, some of them qualitatively different to anything undertaken before. These included an in-depth, national review of the land reform programme, and the release of several media briefings that summarise research findings on poverty in the Western Cape. Others were the co-hosting of a continent-wide networking programme on land and resource rights, and lobbying and advocacy in relation to a proposed new law, the Communal Land Rights Bill. These indicate that PLAAS is only just beginning to realise its potential to combine rigorous academic research, effective communication of research findings, highly-focused policy advocacy, and effective networking in support of African research and policy advocacy. Research highlights of the year include the initiation of a project to evaluate national land and agrarian reform policies and their impacts since 1994. Ruth Hall and Dr Peter Jacobs were recruited to undertake this research and made impressive progress in relation to this ambitious and challenging task. Other important new projects that began in 2002 included Dr Thembela Kepe’s research on HIV/AIDS and land-based livelihoods, and the multi-disciplinary and international KNOWFISH project on the informational needs and institutional structures for effective fisheries co-management, co-ordinated by Dr Mafa Hara.
Annual report 2003
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2004) PLAAS
Applied social science researchers generally want to see their research influence policy and practice; those of a more activist bent seek to ‘change the world, not simply to interpret it’.1 In its mission statement PLAAS envisages a strong connection between its research projects and processes of policy development and advocacy. To this end we are guided by clear values and a commitment to ‘social change that empowers the poor, builds democracy and enhances sustainable development… gender equity is integral to these goals’ (PLAAS mission statement). It is relatively easy to reach agreement on a general statement of this kind, but applying and realising this vision is less straightforward. The macro- and micro-politics of policy making and programme implementation are complicated and often highly contested. In addition, PLAAS researchers do not always agree with one other on the content of policy recommendations or on strategies of engagement. They do, however, seek to learn from each other through discussion and debate on a rich and varied range of experiences.
Annual report 2004
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2005) PLAAS
The wider context of our research and training, and the ultimate rationale for establishing and maintaining a centre such as PLAAS, is the key challenge of deeply entrenched poverty, as well as the inequality to which it is inextricably linked. A majority of citizens in South Africa, as in the wider southern African region, are subject to an on-going crisis of livelihood vulnerability, exacerbated by a raging HIV/Aids pandemic. These realities tend to empty formal democracy of substantive content. Poverty and vulnerability are deepest in rural areas where the majority of the region’s population still lives. The greatest concentrations of such poverty are in those areas previously designated exclusively for African settlement, the former ‘native reserves’, but poverty is also widespread in the commercial farming sector. This sector has always paid extremely low wages, but has been shedding jobs steadily for the past decade, and what jobs survive are largely casual or seasonal in character. Poverty in both contexts has its origins in colonial policies of land acquisition, settlement and economic development that dispossessed the indigenous majority of their land and created dual and highly unequal political, social, legal and economic regimes. A similar legacy is found in coastal communities in relation to unequal access to marine and coastal resources.
Annual report 2006-2007
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2008) PLAAS
Over the past two years the contradictions inherent in South Africa’s post-apartheid growth and development path have become increasingly evident. Growth has not managed to reduce very high levels of unemployment to a significant degree, and large numbers of people remain trapped in structural poverty. The emergence of a growing black middle class has helped reduce inter-racial inequality, but this is small consolation to those with insufficient and insecure incomes who scrape a living in low-wage jobs (sometimes called ‘the working poor’), engage in survivalist micro-enterprises in informal settlements and densely settled rural areas, or depend in large part on social grants. A key question for South Africa is thus: what policies can ensure more inclusive and poverty-reducing forms of economic development?
Annual report 2012
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2013) PLAAS
In much of the global South the instability in global financial systems continued to have dire effects – and there were many worrying signs that the serious food price inflation the world experienced in 2008 would return. In sub-Saharan Africa, policy-makers and investors continued to emphasise that agriculture is central to inclusive economic growth in the region. While this was accompanied by much optimistic talk about the supposed benefits of a ‘green revolution’ in Africa, it is unclear whether many of the projected investments will materialise. In the absence of an understanding of the complex political economy of inequality and hunger in the region, it is unlikely that technical fixes alone will reduce poverty. In South Africa, there was modest progress in the management of poverty but no success in addressing the root causes of massive structural unemployment and inequality. Land, agrarian and rural development policy continued to languish in the doldrums. There was little clarity about the status of the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform’s disappointing 2011 Green Paper; there were significant doubts about the long-term implementability and scalability of the Comprehensive Rural Development Plan, and controversial proposals embodied in the Traditional Courts Bill caused widespread concern.
Another countryside? Policy options for land and agrarian reform in South Africa
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2009) Hall, Ruth
Land reform in South Africa is a political project that has foundered. For years, the process has been variously described as being ‘in crisis’, ‘at a crossroads’, ‘at an impasse’ or simply ’stuck’. This still seems as true as ever, as political pressure is mounting to find new solutions to old problems. In recent years, the issue of ‘delivery’, and how to speed it up, has taken centre stage and become a justificatory framework for arguments about how to reconfigure roles of the state and private sector in land reform. In the process, little attention has been given to the relationship between policy change and mobilisation from below. In the absence of sustained and organised pressure from rural people themselves, it appears that the shifts underway in land reform policy are not so much about ‘delivery’ as about reframing the entire project. Increasingly, the debates on land reform centre not so much on the mechanisms to be used, as on the vision that is to be pursued – something about which existing policy is remarkably silent. At stake is nothing less than what, and whom, land reform is for. South Africans are deeply divided on this question.
Another countryside? Policy options for land and agrarian reform in South Africa
(Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape, 2009) Aliber, Michael; Andrews, Mercia; Baiphethi, Mompati; Cliffe, Lionel; Hall, Ruth; Jacobs, Peter; Jara, Mazibuko; Kleinbooi, Karin; Lahiff, Edward; Zamchiya, Phillan
Land reform in South Africa is a political project that has foundered. For years, the process has been variously described as being ‘in crisis’, ‘at a crossroads’, ‘at an impasse’ or simply ’stuck’. This still seems as true as ever, as political pressure is mounting to find new solutions to old problems. In recent years, the issue of ‘delivery’, and how to speed it up, has taken centre stage and become a justificatory framework for arguments about how to reconfigure roles of the state and private sector in land reform. In the process, little attention has been given to the relationship between policy change and mobilisation from below. In the absence of sustained and organised pressure from rural people themselves, it appears that the shifts underway in land reform policy are not so much about ‘delivery’ as about reframing the entire project. Increasingly, the debates on land reform centre not so much on the mechanisms to be used, as on the vision that is to be pursued – something about which existing policy is remarkably silent. At stake is nothing less than what, and whom, land reform is for. South Africans are deeply divided on this question.
At the crossroads: Land and agrarian reform in South Africa into the 21st century
(Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape, 1999) Cousins, Ben; Emmett, Natashiá; Campbell, Rosie; Heyns, Stephen
The land sector has always been characterised by lively and public arguments over policy, and some of the central and recurring themes of the previous five years of debate were expected to surface at the conference. One of these is whether or not the ANC has the political will to seek to radically alter agrarian power relations and the distribution of resources that underlies them. The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) of 1994 called for a wide-ranging and redistributive land reform2, portrayed as the central driving force behind a large scale rural development programme. Since then the effective displacement of the RDP by the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy (GEAR) and the derisory budget for land reform since 1994/ 95 (never more than one percent of the total budget) have called this commitment into question. Is government s oft-repeated statement that it intends to eliminate rural poverty (most recently in President Mbeki s state of the nation address of February 2000) only a rhetorical gesture?
At the crossroads: Land and agrarian reform in South Africa into the 21st century
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), and National Land Committee (NLC), 2000) Cousins, Ben
These conference proceedings are published at a time of extraordinary fluidity and uncertainty as to the future of the ambitious programmes of land and agrarian reform1 initiated by the first democratic government in 1994. A number of fundamental questions are currently being asked within the sector: What is the future of land and agrarian reform in South Africa in the 21st century? Some observers assert that the African National Congress (ANC) government has effectively jettisoned land reform, without actually announcing this decision to the world at large. If .agrarian questions., including but not limited to questions as to the nature and distribution of land rights, are seen as marginal by those holding state power, then what are the implications for rural people, for land activists, and for the politics of land and agriculture in democratic South Africa? Alternatively, will land and agrarian reform be re-oriented so that its central focus is the fostering of a class of small, medium and largescale black commercial farmers? If so, will government attempt to alleviate rural poverty primarily through welfare programmes and expanded social services rather than through the transfer of productive assets and support for wealth-creating productive activity? If at least some elements of land and agrarian reform continue to be oriented to the needs of the rural poor, what lessons from the first five years need to inform the design and implementation of more effective policies and programmes? These are challenging questions, but important ones to seek answers to. The papers in this collection may assist in such efforts, despite significant shifts in the political context between the early months of 1999, when the papers were written, and March 2000, as these proceedings go to press. The most obvious difference, of course, is the appointment of a new Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs, Thoko Didiza (formerly Deputy Minister of Agriculture). However, the policy implications of this change in leadership are only just beginning to emerge, with the Minister announcing a major new policy thrust on 11 February 2000
Bringing marginalised livelihoods into focus, 2008-2011
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2012) Poniter, Rebecca
Changing agro-food systems: The impact of big agro-investors on food rights. Case studies in Mozambique and Zambia
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2016) Joala, Refiloe; Zamchiya, Phillan; Ntauazi, Clemente; Musole, Patrick; Katebe, Ceasar
This book presents case studies on changing agro-food systems in Southern Africa within the context of large-scale land-based and agri-business investments. By capturing the testimonies of local people in rural settings, with a particular focus on small-scale farmers, it aims to provide vivid accounts of the micro-level changes underway in agro-food systems in Southern Africa, and to reflect the experiences and perspectives of local people.
Changing agro-food systems: The impact of big agro-investors on food rights: Case studies in Mozambique and Zambia
(Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape, 2016) Joala, Refiloe; Zamchiya, Phillan; Ntauazi, Clemente; Musole, Patrick; Katebe, Ceasar
This book presents case studies that offer some insights into the rapid process of change underway in African agro-food systems, and in Southern Africa in particular, within the context of land-based and agricultural investments. These testimonials were gathered as part of exploratory research aimed at investigating how increasing levels of investment are restructuring agro-food systems and the implications of these changes on how people produce and access food. Therefore, we do not claim to present conclusive evidence of the impact of agri-business on local agro-food systems in the region, but rather, we argue that increasing levels of land-based and agricultural investments in Mozambique and Zambia have led to the reconfiguring of the input supply framework, the reshaping of local farming systems and the restructuring of market infrastructure – what we characterise as agro-food systems. The increasing levels of investment are affecting different people in different ways. The case studies presented in this book show the wider impact of these investments on rural livelihoods, household food security and local food environments.
Community response: decline of the Chambo in Lake Malawi's Southeast arm
(Springer, 2011) Hara, Mafaniso
Small-scale fisheries are a major source of food and employment around the world. Yet, many small-scale fishers work in conditions that are neither safe nor secure. Millions of them are poor, and often they are socially and politically marginalized. Macro-economic and institutional mechanisms are essential to address these poverty and vulnerability problems; however, interventions at the local community level are also necessary. This requires deep understanding of what poverty means to the fishers, their families and communities; how they cope with it; and the challenges they face to increase resilience and improve their lives. This book provides a global perspective, situating small-scale fisheries within the broad academic discourse on poverty, fisheries management and development. In-depth case studies from fifteen countries in Latin America, Europe, South and Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, demonstrate the enormously complex ecological, economic, social, cultural and political contexts of this sector. Conclusions for policy-making, formulated as a joint statement by the authors, argue that fisheries development, poverty alleviation, and resource management must be integrated within a comprehensive governance approach that also looks beyond fisheries.
Contested resources: Challenges to the governance of natural resources in Southern Africa
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2002) Benjaminsen, Tor Arve
Papers from the International Symposium on ‘Contested Resources: Challenges to Governance of Natural Resources in Southern Africa. Emerging perspectives from Norwegian-Southern African collaborative research’ held at The University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, 18–20 October 2000
Contested resources: Challenges to the governance of natural resources in Southern Africa
(Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape, 2002) Benjaminsen, Tor Arve; Cousins, Ben; Thompson, Lisa; Campbell, Rosie; Heyns, Stephen
In this keynote address I wish to identify some important ideas and conclusions arising out of recent analyses of theory and practice on natural resource management. I use these in a preliminary attempt to argue that the centrality of power and meaning in processes of ‘governing natural resources’ is not sufficiently addressed in the currently favoured approaches of ‘common property theory’. My intention is to provide some food for thought as we consider together the specific cases presented in the symposium. I am personally committed to the intersection of scholarship or theory-building with practical action, including policy. Note that I say ‘intersection’ – I do not wish to conflate the academic work of theory-building with the practical work of applying theory to policy, but I also reject their total separation as neither possible nor desirable. It is the interface of ideas and action which interests me. I am particularly interested in the way certain ideas or approaches make their way into policy design and implementation, often with no attention being paid to their theoretical premises, and how quickly they become accepted as conventional wisdoms. Equally interesting is the question of why some ideas and approaches developed by thinkers and researchers do not make their way into policy debate. Today, I shall discuss some notions that currently dominate the realm of natural resource management so effectively that they exclude others that might be more appropriate guides.
Decentralised land governance: Case studies and local voices from Botswana, Madagascar and Mozambique
(Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape, 2011) Kleinbooi, Karin; de Satgé, Rick; Tanner, Christopher
Decentralisation has been on the Southern African development agenda for a long time. It is a concept which appears deceptively simple. The principle of subsidiarity holds that decision making about local development priorities needs to take place as close to the people locally involved as possible. Decision making about land access and resource allocation is a key component of a broader decentralisation agenda. However, on closer examination, discourses around decentralisation are complex. They combine preand post colonial histories, changing development trajectories, and understandings about tenure and governance systems. They are set against major shifts in global and local balances of power and fast changing socio-economic relations which further marginalise the poor and deepen inequality.

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