Research Articles (PLAAS)

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10566/629

Browse

Now showing 1 - 20 of 102

Global land deals: What has been done, what has changed, and what’s next?
(The Land Deal Politics Initiative, 2024) Hall, Ruth; Wendy W, Wolford; Ben, White; Scoones, Ian
In 2010, the Land Deals Politics Initiative formed to study the rising number of large-scale land deals taking place around the world. As the so-called ‘global land grab’ took shape, we organised small grant competitions to generate more empirical research into the phenomenon, and we organised conferences to debate the parameters and dynamics from the local level to the global. In this article, we take stock of what has been written about land grabbing as well as the way in which the context has changed since 2010. We highlight the ongoing need for research, as well as the changing nature of financial capital, the institutional “reforms” that resulted from calls for change, new technologies that have emerged to measure and distribute land access, the role of climate change in underpinning powerful new green grabs, and the changing geopolitical context that challenges resistance even as people struggle to retain their access to land. Finally, in the lead up to the 2024 Conference on Global Land Grabbing in Bogotá, Colombia, we highlight several challenges for the next decade of research on global land grabbing.
Transforming critical agrarian studies: Solidarity, scholar-activism and emancipatory agendas in and from the Global South
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023) Aguiar, Diana; Ahmed, Yasmin; Avcı, Duygu
This paper examines the challenges and opportunities faced bycritical agrarian scholars in and from the Global South. We arguethat despite the historical and structural limitations, the criticaljuncture of convergence of crises and renewed interest inagrarian political economies offers an opportunity for fostering adiverse research agenda that opens space for critical perspectivesabout, from and by the Global South, which is mostly absent inmainstream scholarship dominated by the Global North. We alsopropose doing so by enhancing solidarity to transform injusticeswithin academia and other spaces of knowledge production anddissemination
Elite capture in South Africa’s land redistribution: The convergence of policy bias, corrupt practices and class dynamics
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023) Mtero, Farai; Gumede, Nkanyiso; Ramantsima, Katlego
Land reforms are an important mechanism for addressing inequalities in society. Whileaddressing South Africa’s racialised land inequalities remains crucial, new forms of classinequality are produced through land reform, with the well-off becoming predominant asbeneficiaries. This article focuses on elite capture in land redistribution and analysesland-reform outcomes in South Africa’s state land lease and disposal policy (SLLDP). Thearticle presents empirical evidence from 62 land-reform farms in five provinces of SouthAfrica and shows how policy biases in favour of well-off beneficiaries converge withcorruption and rent-seeking practices to produce uneven agrarian outcomes. Beneficiaryselection and targeting inherently favour well-off beneficiaries, who are consideredcompetent to engage in large-scale commercial farming. Land reform is a new frontier ofaccumulation for different agribusinesses, urban-based businesspeople and state officials,who increasingly benefit from cheap state land and various forms of production supportmeant to recapitalise land-reform farms.
Intertwined histories: JPS at 50, La Via Campesina at 30
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023) Hall, Ruth; Grajales, Jacobo; Jacobs, Ricardo
The Journal of Peasant Studies was founded 50 years ago, in 1973, amidst an oil price crisis, the end of the gold standard and the beginning of the debt crisis, an agrarian famine in Bangladesh, and what some consider the last of the ‘peasant wars’. Twenty years later, when the peasant movement La Via Campesina (LVC) was born in 1993, the world was in another cataclysmic moment: the end of the Cold War consolidated the neoliberal orthodoxy that had already wrought violence in the form of structural adjustment policies that dismantled public institutions, deregulated trade, and provoked resistance – including transnational alliances across rural social movements. Today LVC brings together 182 organisations of peasants, small farmers and fishers, and rural workers from 81 countries under the banner of food sovereignty.
Should subsistence agriculture be supported as a strategy to address rural food insecurity?
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2009) Aliber, M; Hart, T. G. B.
At first glance South Africa’s black farming sector appears to contribute rather minimally to overall agricultural output in South Africa. However, despite the complexity involved in this sector and the often marginal conditions in which agriculture is practised it appears to be important to a large number of black households. Furthermore, the significance they attach to subsistence agriculture as means of supplementing household food supplies seems to heavily outweigh other reasons for engaging in agriculture. Some South African researchers have indicated the contribution subsistence production makes to household food security, despite the prevalent complexities and the low input nature of this production. Statistics South Africa’s Labour Force Survey data from 2001 to 2007 and a case study of subsistence farming in Limpopo Province are used to support the argument that, despite the complexity of this sector, the more than 4 million subsistence farmers, need and merit greater support.
Lockdown, resilience and emergency statecraft in the Cape Town food system
(Cities, 2022) Kroll, Florian; Adelle, Camilla
Well before the Covid-19 pandemic, rapidly growing cities of the global South were at the epicenter of multiple converging crises affecting food systems. Globally, government lockdown responses to the disease triggered shocks which cascaded unevenly through urban food systems, exacerbating food insecurity. Cities worldwide developed strategies to mitigate shocks, but research on statecraft enabling food systems resilience is sparse. Addressing this gap, we analyse the case of the African metropolis of Cape Town, where lockdown disrupted livelihoods, mobility and food provision, deepening food insecurity. Employing a vital systems security lens, we show how civil society and state networks mobilised to mitigate and adapt to lockdown impacts. Building on preceding institutional transformations, civil society and state collaborated to deliver emergency food aid, while advocacy networks raised food on the political agenda, formulated proposals, and navigated these through a widened policy window. Emergency statecraft assembled networks and regulatory instruments to secure food systems, enhance preparedness for future disruptions and present opportunities for transition towards more sustainable food systems. However, current food systems configuration enabled powerful actors to resist deeper transformation while devolving impacts to community networks. Despite resilient vested interests and power disparities, advocacy coalitions can anticipate and leverage crises to incrementally advance transformational, pro-poor statecraft.
Life on the land: New lives for agrarian questions
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023) Shattuck, Annie; Grajales, Jacobo; Hall, Ruth
The politics of food, climate, energy, and the yet unfinished work ofending colonialism run square through questions of land. Theclassical agrarian question has taken on new forms, and a newintensity. We look at four dimensions of the agrarian questiontoday: urbanization and labor; care and social reproduction;financialization and global food systems; and social movements.On this 50th anniversary of JPS, we as the journal’s editors invitemore research, vigorous debate, and scholar-activism on theseissues in agrarian politics and beyond. We move into the journal’snext era hoping we might continue to better interpret the worldin order to change it..
Intra-party cohesion in Zimbabwe’s ruling party after Robert Mugabe
(Journal of Asian and African Studies, 2023) Zamchiya, Phillan
Some mainstream political scientists apply the trilogy of exit, voice and loyalty in studying intra-party cohesion. This approach applies more neatly in liberal than in repressive contexts. I therefore make three modifications to enhance the trilogy’s descriptive and explanatory power in an authoritarian context using the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) after Robert Mugabe. First, there is need to integrate non-voluntary exit as party members are mostly expelled against their will in a context where there are limited livelihood opportunities outside party-state patronage and defection is ruthlessly punished. Second, voice should be understood as predominantly expressed over preferences for personalities in internal power distribution rather than over policies. Third, loyalty is not always to the party institution to promote unity but to individuals or factions. From this positioning, ZANU PF is predominantly a non-cohesive party characterised by ephemerally organised leader-follower groups largely seeking power and patronage.
Smallholder views on Chinese agricultural investments in Mozambique and Tanzania in the context of VGGTS
(MDPI, 2023) Pointer, Rebecca; Sulle, Emmanuel; Ntauazi, Clemente
Based on a case study in each country, this study documents the views of Mozambican and Tanzanian smallholders regarding Chinese agricultural investments and the extent to which investors abide by their legitimate land tenure rights as defined by the Voluntary Guidelines for the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Forests and Fisheries in the Context of National Food Security (VGGTs). The VGGTs offer guidelines to government on how to protect the land tenure of rural communities when land is being acquired for large-scale land investments. The study also assessed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on smallholders. Due to COVID-19, instead of fieldwork, we conducted telephone interviews with 20 smallholders in Mozambique and 35 in Tanzania. The Mozambican case showed that even when land set aside for investors was not in dispute, smallholders still had unmet expectations, especially regarding investors’ corporate social responsibility activities. In the Tanzanian case, even though the land leased by the Chinese investor had been designated as general land, it had laid fallow for a long period, and smallholders had moved back onto the land, only to be displaced in 2017.
Resisting agrarian neoliberalism and authoritarianism: Struggles towards a progressive rural future in Mozambique
(Wiley, 2022) Monjane, Boaventura
After nearly two and a half decades with a Land Law widely considered progressive, Mozambique is preparing to revise its legal framework for land. Land activists accuse the government of pursuing an authoritarian approach, excluding civil society participation, and falsifying public consultations. The revision would mark a major shift in Mozambique's land policy towards an even more neoliberal framework to allow the transfer of individual land titles.
Building leaders for the UN Ocean Science Decade: A guide to supporting early career women researchers within academic marine research institutions
(Oxford University Press, 2023) Shellock, Rebecca J; Cvitanovic, Christopher; Isaacs, Moenieba
Diverse and inclusive marine science is now recognized as essential for addressing the complex and accelerating challenges facing marine social-ecological systems (Blythe and Cvitanovic, 2020; Lawless et al., 2021). The United Nations (UN) Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030) identifies gender diversity as integral to achieving its objectives of “the science we need for the ocean we want” and realizing the Sustainable Development Goals. For example, SDG 5.5 specifically aims to ensure that there are equal opportunities for women’s leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic, and public life (UN, 2015). The importance of gender equality has also been reflected in other global initiatives, including the UN Women’s programmes on leadership and participation (UN Women, 2022).
Gender, generation and the experiences of farm dwellers resettled in the Ciskei Bantustan, South Africa, ca 1960–1976
(Wiley, 2013) Evans, Laura
This paper examines the experiences of farm dwellers resettled in rural townships in theCiskei Bantustan during the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on the oraltestimonies of elderly residents of Sada and Ilinge townships, the paper shows how genderedand generational inequalities within households were crucial factors shaping individuals’experiences of resettlement from the farms. The paper engages with an older literature thatregarded the abolition of labour tenancy and linked resettlement programmes as the finalstage of farm tenants’ proletarianization. It highlights the problems of this linear narrative,and argues that men and women experienced and understood this process in radicallydifferent ways. Male labour migration and the remnants of farm paternalism meant thatwhile resettlement cemented the status of migrant men, for women and non-migrant menthis process was characterized by contradiction: on the one hand, escape from the spatialhegemonies of farm paternalism and, on the other, heightened economic exposure.
South Africa’s Bantustans and the dynamics of “decolonisation”: Reflections on writing histories of the homelands
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2012) Evans, Laura
From the late 1950s, as independent African polities replaced formal colonialrule in Africa, South Africa’s white minority regime set about its own policy ofmimicry in the promotion of self-governing homelands, which were to beguided to full ‘independence’. Scholarly study of South Africa’s homelands hasremained largely apart from accounts of decolonisation in Africa. Aninterpretation of South Africa’s exceptional political path in the era of Africandecolonisation that has dominated the literature has meant that importantdebates in African history, which might helpfully illuminate the South Africancase, have been neglected. In seeking inspiration for new histories of thehomelands, this article looks beyond South Africa’s borders to processes of anddebates on decolonisation in Africa.
More than socially embedded: The distinctive character of ‘communal tenure’ regimes in South Africa and its implications for land policy
(Wiley, 2007) Cousins, Ben
This article analyzes debates over tenure reform policy in post-apartheid South Africa, with a particular focus on the controversial Communal Land Rights Act of 2004. Land tenure systems in the ‘communal areas’ of South Africa are described as dynamic and evolving regimes within which a number of important commonalities and continuities over time are observable. Key underlying principles of pre-colonial land relations are identified, which in formed the adaptation and modification of tenure regimes in the colonial era and under policies of segregation and apartheid, and continue to do so today. Exploring the policy implications of this analysis, the article suggests that alternative approaches to that embodied in the Communal Land Rights Act are required. The most appropriate approach is to make socially legitimate occupation and use rights, as they are currently held and practised, the point of departure for both their recognition in law and for the design of institutional frameworks for administering land.
The next great Trek? South African commercial farmers move north
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2012) Hall, Ruth
This paper analyses the shifting role of South African farmers, agribusiness andcapital elsewhere in the Southern African region and the rest of the continent. Itexplores recent trends in this expansion, and investigates the interests and agendasshaping such deals, and the ideologies and discourses of legitimation employed infavour of them. While for the past two decades small numbers of South Africanfarmers have moved to Mozambique, Zambia and several other countries, thistrend seems to be undergoing both a quantitative and a qualitative shift. Whereasin the past their migration was largely individual or in small groups, now it isbeing more centrally organised and coordinated, is more frequently taking theform of large concessions for newly formed consortia and agribusinesses, and isincreasingly reliant on external financing through transnational partnerships. Byearly 2010, the commercial farmers’ association Agri South Africa (AgriSA) wasengaged in negotiations for land acquisitions with the governments of 22 Africancountries.
Smallholder Aagriculture and land reform in South Africa
(Institute of Development Studies, 2005) Lahiff, Edward; Cousins, Ben
How canland reformcontribute toa revitalisationof smallholder agriculture inSouthernAfrica?Thisquestion remains important despitenegativeperceptions of land reformas a result of the impactofZimbabwe’s “fast-track” resettlement programmeonagriculturalproduction.This articlefocusesmainly onSouthAfrica, whereahighly unequaldistributionof landcoexists withdeep ruralpoverty,but dominant narratives of the efficiency of large-scaleagriculture exert a s trangleholdon r uralpolicy(cfToulminandGuèye, this IDSBulletinfor WestAfrica).
Institutions and Co-Management in East African Inland and Malawi Fisheries: A Critical Perspective
(Elsivier, 2015) Nunan, Fiona; Hara, Mafaniso; Onyango, Paul
Institutions matter within natural resource management. While there are many examples of analyses of the nature and influence of institutions within fisheries, there are fewer examples of how institutions inform the practice and outcomes of co-management. This article reports on analysis of institutions and fisheries co-management in East African and Malawi inland fisheries informed by Critical Institutionalism. It concludes that relations between fisheries departments and local co-management structures, and between local government/traditional authorities and local co-management structures, and social, power, and gender relations within and beyond fisheries communities, particularly impact on the practice and outcomes of co-management.
Cash transfers for sustainable rural livelihoods? Examining the long-term productive effects of the Child Support Grant in South Africa
(Elsivier, 2020) Neves, David; Granlund, Stefan
Cash transfers have received increased scholarly and policy attention, as a means of reducing poverty in the global South. While cash transfers are primarily intended to prevent impoverishment and deprivation, several studies suggest they can have 'productive' impacts, contributing to building sustainable livelihoods. However, pilot projects of unconditional cash transfers have often been too brief or too recent to determine how small, but regular, transfers can improve rural livelihoods over time. This paper explores potential long-term productive effects of cash transfers on rural household’s livelihoods. This is done through revisiting, after 14 years, all (273) households in two South African villages included in an extensive livelihood and asset survey in 2002. That survey predated the phasing in of the Child Support Grant (CSG), targeted at impoverished children. When re-surveyed in 2016, some households had cumulatively received significant, while others little or no CSG income. Multivariate regression analysis shows how households that received more CGS income were more likely to invest in productive assets (e.g. small ploughs), and engage in poultry, staple crop and vegetable production. We also found a statistically significant correlation between CSG incomes and growing a larger variety of crops, in an environment generally marked by deagrarianization. However, correlations between receiving more CSG and employment or engagement in informal small-scale trade were not significant. We use data from interviews and observations to explain these processes further.
Rights and representation support justice across aquatic food systems
(Nature Research, 2022) Hicks, Christina C.; Gephart, Jessica A.; Isaacs, Moenieba
Injustices are prevalent in food systems, where the accumulation of vast wealth is possible for a few, yet one in ten people remain hungry. Here, for 194 countries we combine aquatic food production, distribution and consumption data with corresponding national policy documents and, drawing on theories of social justice, explore whether barriers to participation explain unequal distributions of benefits. Using Bayesian models, we find economic and political barriers are associated with lower wealth-based benefits; countries produce and consume less when wealth, formal education and voice and accountability are lacking. In contrast, social barriers are associated with lower welfare-based benefits; aquatic foods are less affordable where gender inequality is greater.
Dietary patterns, food insecurity, and their relationships with food sources and social determinants in two small island developing states
(MDPI, 2022) Bhagtani, Divya; Augustus, Eden; Kroll, Florian
Small Island Developing States (SIDS) have high burdens of nutrition-related chronic diseases. This has been associated with lack of access to adequate and affordable nutritious foods and increasing reliance on imported foods. Our aim in this study was to investigate dietary patterns and food insecurity and assess their associations with socio-demographic characteristics and food sources. We recruited individuals aged 15 years and above from rural and urban areas in Fiji (n = 186) and St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) (n = 147). Data collection included a 24 h diet recall, food source questionnaire and the Food Insecurity Experience Scale. We conducted latent class analysis to identify dietary patterns, and multivariable regression to investigate independent associations with dietary patterns.

Browse

collection.page.browse.recent.head