Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS)
Browse by
The Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) engages in research, training, policy development and advocacy in relation to land and agrarian reform, rural governance and natural resource management. It is committed to social change that empowers the poor, builds democracy and enhances sustainable livelihoods.
Collections in this community
Recent Submissions
-
Farm workers and farm dwellers in Limpopo, South Africa: struggles over tenure, livelihoods and justice
(Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, 2013)In the late 1990s land and agrarian issues remained a barrier to the enjoyment of human rights and justice for millions of South Africans. With funding from the Norwegian government, the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights ... -
The legacies of the Natives Land Act of 1913
(Stellenbosch University, 2014)Looking back at the century since the promulgation of the Natives Land Act, it can be argued that it shaped the trajectories of most South Africans’ lives. It expelled black people from the land into crowded reserves and ... -
Small-scale fisheries governance and understanding the snoek (Thyrsites atun) supply chain in the Ocean View fishing community, Western Cape, South Africa
(Resilience Alliance, 2013)Postapartheid fisheries reform in South Africa, through the Marine Living Resources Act (MLRA) 18 of 1998, used individual transferable quotas (ITQs) to broaden resource access through allocating quotas to new entrants, ... -
Women's land rights and social change in rural South Africa: the case of Msinga, KwaZulu-Natal
(Juta Law, 2013)Changing marriage practices and a continuing decline in marriage rates are generating tensions in rural South Africa and prompting innovations in the character of women's rights to land. Empirical evidence of changing ... -
An institutional approach for developing South African inland freshwater fisheries for improved food security and rural livelihoods
(Water Research Commission, 2014)South Africa has over 4 700 storage dams, about 700 of which are owned and controlled by Government. Public dams were primarily constructed for domestic, irrigation and industrial water supply. Over time secondary uses for ... -
Smallholder irrigation schemes, agrarian reform and ‘accumulation from above and from below’ in South Africa
(Wiley & Blackwell Publishing, 2013)A key issue in debates on agrarian reform in South Africa is the potential for small-scale farming, in conjunction with redistributive land reform, to make a significant contribution to employment creation and poverty ... -
Value chain analysis of Lake Malawi fish: a case study of Oreochromis spp (Chambo)
(Center for Promoting Ideas (CPI), 2013)Chambo has potential of improving fishers’ socio-economic status in Malawi. The paper examines Chambo value chain whose findings will improve fish marketing by actors along the chain. Quantitative value chain analysis used, ... -
Revisiting unresolved questions: land, food and agriculture
(University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2011)This article explores three articles from the perspective of 2011. They are Makhosazane Gcabashe and Alan Mabin’s ‘Preparing to negotiate the land question’ (Transformation 11), Tom Bennett’s ‘Human rights and the African ... -
Community response: decline of the Chambo in Lake Malawi's Southeast arm
(Springer, 2011)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 ... -
Acts, imagined landscapes: reflections on the discourses of land reform in South Africa after 1994
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2013)This paper discusses the discourses by which land reform policies in South Africa have been justified and criticized. Critical thought is needed about the underlying assumptions and frameworks informing policy and critique. ... -
Money and sociality in South Africa's informal economy
(Cambridge University Press, 2012)This article examines the interplay of agency, culture and context in order to consider the social embeddedness of money and trade at the margins of South Africa’s economy. Focusing on small-scale, survivalist informal ... -
Reshaping women’s land rights on communal rangeland
(National Inquiry Services Centre (NISC) (Pty) Ltd, 2013)This paper aims to contribute to the debates on communal rangelands and analyses the gendered dimension of land rights and land access in the rural areas of Namaqualand. The actual gender relations within rural communities ... -
Status report on land and agricultural policy in South Africa
(PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2010)A strategy that seeks to insert smallholders into the large-scale, industrial, export-oriented model can only succeed in broadening and diversifying the producer base slightly. The large-scale model also brings ... -
Livestock and the rangeland commons in South Africa’s land and agrarian reform
(NISC (Pty) Ltd and Taylor & Francis, 2013)Land and agrarian reform has the potential to expand South Africa’s rangeland commons and enhance their contribution to the livelihoods of the rural poor, yet to a large extent this has been an opportunity missed. ... -
The trouble with poverty: reflections on South Africa's post-apartheid anti-poverty consensus
(PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2012)This paper considers the state of poverty discourse in South Africa since 1994: the ideological frameworks, narratives and assumptions that have shaped the construction of poverty as an object of academic knowledge, ... -
Elite land grabbing in Namibian communal areas and its impact on subsistence farmers’ livelihoods
(PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2011)This brief examines some emerging trends and dynamics in changing power relations in rural Namibian communities due to emerging new elites and the threats to subsistence farmers’ access to communal land and ... -
Nasruddin's key: poverty measurement and the government of marginal populations
(Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape., 2011)This paper considers the role of ‘measurement’ and other forms of poverty knowledge in a context where the nature and direction of global economic growth is creating ‘surplus populations’ suffering various forms of ... -
Contesting the food system in South Africa: issues and opportunities
(Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape, 2010)This report widens the debate about food production and distribution in South Africa to consider some of the entrenched power dynamics that shape the way these happen, and to consider whether a more radical transformation ... -
Social reproduction, accumulation and class differentiation: small-scale sugarcane growers in Mtubatuba, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
(PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2012)This paper argues that the rise and decline of small-scale sugarcane grower (SSG) production in KwaZulu-Natal must be historically located within a changing structural relationship with miller-processors, in turn conditioned ... -
The changing nature of large-scale commercial farming & implications for agrarian reform: evidence from Limpopo, Western Cape and Northern Cape
(PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2012)The privileged position of white commercial farmers in South Africa came to an end by the early 1990s, when political and policy changes removed the certainty provided by controlled marketing, protective tariffs and ...
RSS 1.0