Working Papers

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Changing customary land tenure regimes in Zambia, implications for women’s land rights
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2023-03) Zamchiya, Phillan; Musa, Chilombo
This paper argues that the formalisation of customary land through a rural certification programme in Nyimba District, Zambia, has triggered the establishment of a new tenure regime that transcends the dualism between Western legal forms of private property and idealised customary systems. Within this agrarian transition, the number of social conflicts over land boundaries have fallen, at least in the short term; women’s perceptions of tenure security have improved; and women’s participation in land administration at the local level has increased. In addition, a significant number of married women have registered residential land and farmland in their own names. However, the transition has also produced a number of negative impacts. Multiple land claims by women have been dismissed. Men have continued to dominate power relations in the district. Certification has not necessarily led to greater access to credit, improved agricultural productivity, or a rise in investment. Informal land markets have become more expensive with certification producing a veneer of legitimacy for buying and selling customary land, even though such transactions remain, strictly speaking, illegal. On the other hand, agrarian support has been skewed to the benefit of wealthier, better-connected, and dominant women with land-holding certificates and to the detriment of less-powerful women. Accordingly, many of the envisaged benefits of formalisation through an evolutionary approach to land tenure rights have not been realised. The argument developed by this paper is based on original field data obtained through quantitative household surveys, in-depth interviews and focus group discussions.
The Land and Its People: the land question and the South African political order
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2023-03) Du Toit, Andries
This paper examines the disjuncture between the discourses of policy deliberation and contentious politics in debates about ‘the land question’ in South Africa. It argues that the South African land debate as it unfolds in the public realm is best understood as a displaced discourse indirectly addressing the terms of political belonging and the nature of the post-apartheid political order. Far from being a distraction, this is a challenge that urgently needs to be confronted in its own terms. Confronting the crisis of the post-apartheid political order requires a re-thinking of the terms in which national identity is conceived. The paper explores the possibilities of a politics of belonging centred on the Constitutional invocation of a political order ‘for all who live in it’ and what this might imply for a more constructive and productive engagement with land struggles in urban and rural South Africa.
Future-making and scalar politics in a resource frontier: Energy projects in northern Kenya
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2022-01-28) Greiner, Clemens; Klagge, Britta; Grawert, Elke; Mkutu, Kennedy
This contribution explores conflicts in the context of energy-related investments and infrastructure projects in Kenya’s arid and semiarid north. Over the past decade or so this historically marginalised region has turned into a resource frontier. Such frontiers arise as capitalist and state actors penetrate rural hinterlands, with the aim of transforming these regions according to competing visions of the future that operate at different scales. The projects considered here include the Lake Turkana Wind Power Project (LTWP), the expansion of geothermal energy production, and the extraction of crude oil, which jointly exemplify the contested and scalar politics entailed by “future-making”. Against this background, this contribution analyses how different energy projects are brought about by different actors, including how their impacts on local livelihoods are negotiated across scales. This contribution explores how frontier situations generally, and the recent devolution of government in Kenya, impact such negotiations.
Collapse, conflict or social cohesion? Learning from livestock dipping associations in Kwazulu-Natal
(2020-06-29) Gibbs, Tim
This working paper is about the revival of communal cattle dipping in post-apartheid KwaZulu-Natal, which has improved animal healthcare and strengthened the livelihoods of the black rural households that keep cattle in the province. Given that the authoritarian system of apartheid era livestock dipping fell apart during South Africa’s democratic transition, this is a remarkable achievement. Other provinces have struggled to revive dipping – such that tick-borne diseases are endemic along the Wild Coast of the Eastern Cape, for instance. By contrast, perhaps 90-95% of the 1600-odd dip tanks in KwaZulu-Natal are run relatively well by local Livestock Associations, which organise regular cattle dipping in conjunction with the provincial government’s vet services department. There are opportunities to strengthen and expand the remit of the Livestock Associations: these remarkable organs of civil society which might be collectively collecting R450 million in membership fees each year. There is also much to learn from KwaZulu-Natal’s example. At a time when much is written about the weakness of government institutions in rural South Africa, here is a quiet, largely unnoticed, ‘success story’ of an effective relationship between the state and civil society that we would do well to understand.
Differentiation and development: The case of the Xolobeni community in the Eastern Cape, South Africa
(PLAAS, 2019-11-15) Zamchiya, Phillan
Most agrarian scholars argue that long historic processes of colonialism, capitalist development and implementation of neo-liberal structural policies in Sub-Saharan Africa have resulted in deagrarianisation and its sub-genre of depeasantisation particularly in South Africa. I argue that this long historic process epitomised, in some cases, by abandonment of cropping fields and deactivation of agriculture was uneven between and within communities across South Africa. Glossing over the geographic and socially differentiated outcomes has partly led to the general characterisation of rural communities as relic agrarian populations that need to be modernised through a new wave of large-scale land based investments. To substantiate, I use the case study of Xolobeni, which is situated on the Wild Coast, in the Eastern Cape Province. The Xolobeni community is engaged in a struggle against the South African government and the Transworld Energy and Minerals Resources (TEM) from Australia, which wants to invest in titanium mining in the area since 2001. Following a series of struggles, in 2018 the North Gauteng High Court ruled that the community has a right to say no to a development project, in line with the international principle of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC). In addition to this legal right, I posit that the community actively used land for multiple livelihoods including gardening, livestock and crop production as well as marine resource harvesting for both consumption and for sale in contrast to the deactivation thesis. Given local processes of social differentiation, the benefits differed to a degree across a continuum of subsistence-oriented households, market-oriented households, wage and sale reliant households and wage reliant households. However, in all cases land-based livelihoods were essential in enabling households to create a higher standard of living. Consequently, the community preferred ecotourism and an agrarian model of development that would preserve their livelihoods, conserve ecological natural resources and reduce rural poverty as well as contribute to wider national economic development.
Whose Land Question? Policy deliberation and populist reason in the South African land debate
(PLAAS, 2019-11) Du Toit, Andries
On 4 and 5 February 2019, the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), along with colleagues from the Universities of Fort Hare and of Rhodes, hosted a national conference entitled Resolving the Land Question: Land redistribution for equitable access to land in South Africa. This paper considers this conference as a case study of ‘policy sense-making’—an attempt to frame contentious issues in a way that renders them amenable to governmental resolution. It explores the contrasting conceptions of the political rationality of land reform put forward at the conference, and the different conceptions of the nature of democracy and government that informed competing policy visions. The paper also considers the disjuncture between the world of technical land reform policy deliberation on the one hand, the way the notion of land is used in contentious and popular politics in the public sphere on the other. In the end, the paper argues, much more is at stake in South African land debates than land itself. Beyond the question of who should own the land, how it should be used, and how it could be shared are deep and intractable questions about the nature of South African democracy and of the political community on which it depends.
What price cheap goods? Survivalists, informalists and competition in the township retail grocery trade
(PLAAS, 2019-08-31) Petersen, Leif; Thorogood, Camilla; Charman, Andrew; Du Toit, Andries
About 54% of South Africa’s township microenterprises trade in food or drink. More than two-thirds of these are grocery retail businesses in the form of spaza shops and smaller ‘house shops’. These are the predominant businesses within the ‘township economy’ and play an important role in food security, self-employment and community cohesion. In the last decade, the business of spaza shops (dedicated, signposted businesses with a range of foodstuffs and open five days per week or more) has undergone extensive change towards a new class of entrepreneurial traders – mostly foreign nationals. This change has meant that the sector has become increasingly controversial and associated with chauvinistic and xenophobic discourses targeting immigrants. While the nature, causes and extent of change in informal grocery retail markets have been noted by various authors over the past decade, there is as yet no comprehensive account of the changing nature of business dynamics and competitiveness in the sector.
Rural resource grabs or necessary inward investment? The politics of land and water in Africa
(International Institute for Environment and Development, 2015) Hall, Ruth
What has happened since the furore broke over the corporate land rush in Africa? Field-based research has exposed new realities that challenge the linear suggestions of a ‘grab’. As the process unfolds and our understanding deepens, the single narrative of the ‘land grab’ fractures into multiple messy elements. New perspectives have emerged, which reinforce the view that such a grab is underway, yet complicate our understanding of who is doing this, why, how, where and with what results. At the same time, a ‘governance rush’ has seen a proliferation of international frameworks that try to regulate, rather than stop, corporate and elite acquisitions of African land and water.
How can we promote a range of livelihood opportunities through land redistribution?
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2019) Aliber, Michael
This position paper sketches an approach to improving land redistribution in South Africa in which the broad aim is to use redistribution to create a range of livelihood opportunities, in meaningful numbers, in proportion to the understood need. The approach laid out in the paper is informed first and foremost by a reflection on South Africa’s land reform to date, which among other things requires contemplation of the respective strengths and limitations of government and other role-players, and market-based versus other mechanisms. The main argument is that government can and must play an active role to ensure that land reform caters to the demand for small farms on which to create opportunities for commercially-oriented smallholders, and for small plots for those whose primary need is tenure and food security. Somewhat different mechanisms can serve the interests of those seeking help through land reform to expand into large-scale farming. The paper illustrates/estimates how these diverse needs could be addressed in a balanced manner, and met in significant numbers given a larger budget for land redistribution, which is not unimaginable given the current budget’s negligible size.
Principles and practice for successful farmland redistribution in South Africa
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2019) Vink, Nick; Kirsten, Johann
The current debate on land reform in South Africa is unnecessarily polarised between those who believe that the market has failed to deliver, and those who believe that the bureaucracy has failed to deliver. Instead, we propose a ‘state-incentivised but private sector-delivered’ land reform that has a first ‘fast-track’ phase of a decade in which rapid land transfer is effected by a joint effort between the state and private actors. This calls for the creation of a virtual land depository and a Land Reform Fund where the private sector provides the bulk of the land and the funds, and these two actors partner with land reform beneficiaries and commercial farmers to create a support environment that allows new farmers the opportunity to establish themselves successfully in the agricultural sector.
Mining, capital and dispossession in Limpopo, South Africa
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2019) Zamchiya, Phillan
This Working Paper explains the processes by which land, water and other natural resources were seized, and their previous users dispossessed, for the purposes of capital accumulation by Ivanplats platinum mining company in Limpopo, South Africa. The mining firm largely acquired land through non-voluntary mechanisms by disregarding South Africa’s Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act (IPILRA) set to protect the lawful occupiers and users of land. Through detailed empirical examination, I demonstrate how locals in Limpopo experienced dispossession through enclosure of farmland, water sources, grazing fields and cultural shrines, paving the way for accumulation by the mining firm. Beyond productive sources, the mining firm also acquired capital through imposing financial interests on unfair community loans. Corruption, coercion and bribes were useful dispossession tools in a powerful triple alliance of investors, state officials and traditional leaders. This exacerbated the crises of livelihoods for many, especially women, who did not integrate in the new mining wage-labour economy and its entrepreneurial opportunities. I partly agree with scholars who have used some Accumulation by Dispossession (ABD) features to explain this phenomenon. However, it is important to note that dispossession even through economic means and with voluntary consent can also lead to similar dire consequences for the rural poor. In addition, the farmers were not out of capitalist relations of production as implied in the conceptualisation of ABD with its genealogy in primitive accumulation and there was no full rural proletarianisation. Given the nominal welfarist benefits for the locals in this extractivist model of investment, covert, intermediary and overt resistance to land dispossession was rife, though it met with brutal state force making the future unstable and uncertain
Labour regulation and the economy: The case of the food value chain
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2016) Theron, Jan
Contrary to a popular narrative which seeks to attribute the country’s economic ills to labour legislation, this paper argues that the role of law in relation to the economy is constitutive, and that labour can also not be considered in isolation from other branches of law in this regard. The regime constituted by labour law has also always had a dual character, in which there are ‘outsiders’ to which certain key provisions - specifically rights to organise and bargain - do not apply. To elaborate this argument, the paper considers the law’s role in structuring employment in the food value chain to show how key provisions of labour legislation, and other laws, fail to take into account how employment is increasingly externalised, and how the number of ‘outsiders’ is growing. The paper also considers the role of worker organisation and collective bargaining, and other regulatory strategies in the food value chain
The mining-conservation nexus: Rio Tinto, development ‘gifts’ and contested compensation in Madagascar
(Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape, 2011) Seagle, Caroline
This paper traces a genealogy of land access and legitimisation strategies culminating in the recent convergence of multinational mining and conservation in southeast Madagascar. Drawing on empirical research carried out on the Rio Tinto/QMM ilmenite mine in Fort Dauphin, it focuses on how local Malagasy land users are incorporated into new forms of inclusion (into the neoliberal capitalist economy) and exclusion (from land-based, subsistence activities) resulting from private sector engagement in conservation. Various material impacts of the mine were inverted and remediated to global audiences as necessary to sustainable development and biodiversity conservation. By financing, partnering with and participating in the same land access markets as international conservation NGOs, and setting aside small ‘conservation enclaves’ in each mining site, Rio Tinto/QMM legitimise mining in situ despite the negative socio-environmental consequences for the Malagasy. Mining–conservation partnerships may fail to adequately address — and ultimately exclude — the needs of people affected by the mines.
Transforming traditional land governance systems and coping with land deal transactions
(Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape, 2012) Mahonge, Christopher
This study aimed to gain insight into how land deals have affected traditional Tanzanian land-based interactions and networks, and what coping mechanisms those affected have deployed. Case studies of land deal transactions — in both the Kisarawe district, in the Coast region and the Same district in the Kilimanjaro region —show the impact of cultivating bio-energy crops on traditional land. While the Same district employed an out-grower model to cultivate biofuel, Kisarawe district adopted the plantation approach. Traditional land governance systems and actors are affected differently by out-grower and plantation biofuel production models; the plantation model leads to traditional land governance frameworks being totally dismantled, while the out-grower model has insignificant impact on traditional land governance systems. For both models, laws and guidelines governing biofuel cultivation are ineffective: plantation and out-grower biofuel cultivation exacerbates a vicious cycle of poverty and environmental degradation. More research in other socio-ecological environments is necessary to understand broader interactions between land deals and traditional governance systems, and then to develop concrete, sound guidelines to govern foreign, national and local institutional actors involved in land deals.
Agricultural land acquisition by foreign investors in Pakistan: Government policy and community responses
(Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape, 2012) Settle, Antonia C.
This paper explores the Pakistani government’s 2009 agricultural investment policy package — a response to increasing foreign investor interest in agricultural land — and considers the likely implications for local communities. By analysing the policy pertaining to the categories of cultivated and uncultivated land, the paper explores possible consequences that peasant farming communities and grazing communities face. The policy’s dependence on arbitrary and anti-poor colonial-era laws and processes places the policy squarely in established centre–periphery relations rooted by colonial-era politics of land ownership. Thus, the offer of agricultural land to foreign investors is both an unprecedented international land grab and a development in ongoing land appropriation by influential people through state apparatuses, continuous with colonial practices. This in turn has spurred community responses within the same dynamic of colonially rooted centre–periphery conflict; community responses revolve around various ethnic separatist movements that originated in earlier colonial politics. Apart from the precarious balance of social and economic power in Pakistan — evident in the making and implications of the agricultural investment policy — the findings point to an urgent need for the Pakistani government to address environmental and food security issues.
Gendered dimensions of land and rural livelihoods: The case of new settler farmer displacement at Nuanetsi Ranch, Mwenezi District, Zimbabwe
(Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape, 2012) Mutopo, Patience
Nuanetsi Ranch had been invaded by villagers from different parts of Mwenezi, Chiredzi and Chivi communal areas since 2000. In February 2010, the government announced that the settlers had to be removed and resettled in other ’uncontested lands’ in the area, compromising their rights to sustainable livelihoods, human development and land acquisition. The perceptions of the men and women resident at Chigwizi has had a bearing on understanding the nature of gendered land and rural livelihoods in the context of biofuel production in Zimbabwe, after fast track land reform.
Conservation and ecotourism on privatised land in the Mara, Kenya: The case of conservancy land leases
(Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape, 2012) Bedelian, Claire
This paper investigates private sector investment in conservation and ecotourism through conservancy land leases in the Mara region of Kenya. In a recent and growing tourism development, groups of Maasai landowners are leasing their parcels of land to tourism investors and forming wildlife conservancies. The paper examines this new conservation and ecotourism model and the implications it has for Maasai livelihoods and the environment. The subdivision of Kenya’s rangelands has tended to benefit elites, and as a consequence this trend is reinforced in landbased schemes such as these. Given the large extent and recent change in ownership in these areas, land leases do however keep the lands they cover together and are potentially an optimistic outlook for such open rangeland areas. Consideration however must be given to adjacent areas and communities that may face the negative knock on effects of such schemes. The Mara is a unique area in terms of its tourism and wildlife, so land leases may not be able to offer as much to landowners in other areas, or be financially sustainable across vast areas. However, within the Mara, land leases have been rapidly expanded upon, implying that similar schemes might be of interest to both investors and communities alike in other wildlife areas.
Drivers and actors in large-scale farmland acquisitions in Sudan
(Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape, 2012) Keulertz, Martin
This study analyses the political, economic and social impacts of the land and ‘virtual water’ grab in Southern Sudan. The ‘virtual water’ concept, which explains the absence of water wars through water embedded in agricultural imports, has been a major breakthrough in the study of the Middle Eastern water question. This paper shows how agricultural commodities in the form of virtual water are at the heart of Middle Eastern investors’ interests. The paper sheds light on investments in Southern Sudan, which are a form of water arbitrage by investing countries. The virtual extension of the investing countries’ Lebensraum into the recipient countries is part of a ‘new scramble’ over African resources — namely water resources. However, the risks of such investment activities lie in the social and environmental sphere with tribal conflicts and poor soil quality.
Commercial biofuel land deals & environment and social impact assessments in Africa: Three case studies in Mozambique and Sierra Leone
(Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape, 2011) Andrew, Maura; Van Vlaenderen, Hilde
The rapid increase in attempts by foreign investors to acquire large tracts of land in Africa for biofuel developments has generated substantial concern about their potential negative impact on the communities living in the targeted areas. This includes concerns about the impact on local residents’ livelihoods, their access to land, natural resources and labour, and their food security. This paper examines three case studies of proposed biofuel developments in Mozambique and Sierra Leone in terms of their social displacement impacts and the extent to which such impacts can be avoided or minimised. The case studies show that even in areas with low population densities and settlements concentrated in villages where it is easier to minimise displacement impacts, livelihood displacement impacts still cannot be entirely avoided due to communal and scattered land use in most rural areas. Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) processes have changed the location, size and boundaries of developments to reduce displacement impacts, but more mitigation measures — such as outgrower schemes and land dedicated to food production — can provide further livelihood restitution and avoid food security impacts. The three biofuel ventures also highlight the influence of tenure security for local land right holders in determining the nature of the land deals and the consultation processes: cases where land leases are made with central government seem to provide fewer incentives for developers to negotiate directly with local communities and provide them with lower levels of compensation.
The role of foreign investment in Ethiopia’s smallholder-focused agricultural development strategy
(Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape, 2011) Lavers, Tom
Recent foreign agricultural investment in Africa has generated a great deal of interest and criticism, with western media warning of a neo-colonial ‘land grab’. This paper moves beyond this narrow assessment by examining the political and social dynamics of foreign agricultural investment in Ethiopia, a country that has figured prominently in recent debates. The paper links macro-level analysis regarding the types of projects and their role in the Ethiopian economy to case studies of investments at the micro-level, which examine changing patterns of land use and implications for displacement, employment and technology transfer. The paper concludes that the expansion of foreign investment in Ethiopia is part of a government move towards an export-led development strategy. As such, macro-benefits in terms of increased foreign exchange earnings come at the cost of increased micro-level risks to those living near new investments, in particular, politically marginalised pastoral populations in remote regions.

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