Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS)

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The institute 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

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Community response: decline of the Chambo in Lake Malawi's Southeast arm

Hara, Mafaniso (Springer, 2011)

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Abstract:

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.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10566/850

Files in this item: 1

Povfish, Chapter 12.pdf (343.9Kb)

Acts, imagined landscapes: reflections on the discourses of land reform in South Africa after 1994

du Toit, Andries (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013)

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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. While key aspects of populist, ‘Left’ and liberal ideologies helped mobilize support for land reform after 1994, they framed questions of equitable transformation and justice in ways that obscured the terrain of struggle rather than revealing it. The broad consensus on the legitimacy of land reform in the initial decade after 1994 was underpinned by narratives about redress and reconciliation that privileged reparative justice above distributive equity. It tended to obscure the complex trade-offs and impacts involved in implementation. Coherent policy-making was further undermined by simplistic oppositions between ’market’ and ‘rights-based’ approaches that often led to ill-targeted policies. Land and agrarian reform needs to be liberated from this symbolic burden. It should be informed by an understanding of the nature of inequality in South Africa and the contribution that agrarian change can make to reducing it.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10566/845

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Money and sociality in South Africa's informal economy

Neves, David; Du Toit, Andries (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

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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 enterprise operators, it draws on socio-cultural analysis to explore the social dynamics involved in generating and managing wealth. After describing the informal sector in South Africa, the article elucidates the relationship between money and economic informality. First, diverse objectives, typically irreducible to the maximization of profit, animate those in the informal sector and challenge meta-narratives of a ‘great transformation’ towards socially disembedded and depersonalized economic relationships. Second, regimes of economic governance, both state-led and informal, shape the terrain on which informal economic activity occurs in complex and constitutive ways. Third, local idioms and practices of trading, managing money and negotiating social claims similarly configure economic activities. Fourth, and finally, encroaching and often inexorable processes of formalization differentially influence those in the informal sector. The analysis draws on these findings to recapitulate both the ubiquity and centrality of the sociality at the heart of economy, and to examine the particular forms they take in South Africa’s informal economy.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10566/834

Files in this item: 1

NevesInformalEconomy2012.pdf (129.6Kb)

Reshaping women’s land rights on communal rangeland

Kleinbooi, Karin (National Inquiry Services Centre (NISC) (Pty) Ltd, 2013)

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Abstract:

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 and the emergence of strategies that are being pursued in communal land processes are obscured and often ignored in policies about communal rangelands, which over-emphasise ‘the ecological and economic impact’ and the balancing of these dimensions. As active, primary users, women play a central role in livelihoods supported by communal rangelands yet their access to land is mediated through their relationships with men, effectively circumventing women’s land autonomy. A wider debate is necessary to advance the largely superficial policy considerations of women’s position in relation to communal rangelands land and their social exclusion on the basis of traditional control of land, forms of access and claiming of use rights. The paper discusses the complexity of land rights under communal land tenure and argues that, despite traditional and policy barriers, women in traditional systems of male-dominated land rights have had some success in accessing communal rangelands. Greater policy impetus is necessary to leverage equitable and independent land access for women amid debates about management of communal rangelands.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10566/772

Files in this item: 0

Status report on land and agricultural policy in South Africa

Greenberg, Stephen (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2010)

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Abstract:

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 with it the deepening problems of concentration in the value chain, which, in turn, entrench the production model. The ANC in government has identified the major contours of the challenge, but its responses tend towards seeking to deracialise that model while keeping its core intact. An alternative has to confront the existing economic power of commercial agriculture and agro-industry with the aim of transforming it in the interests of the poor. Deracialisation is necessary, but is not sufficient to realise this. The logic of a smallholder strategy must be followed beyond the farm gate, to the institutions that support agriculture and the value chains that feed off it.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10566/657

Files in this item: 1

RR40_0.pdf (1.186Mb)

Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS)

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