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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Very often, in our work at PLAAS, we encounter two common misunderstandings about what it is that we do and why it is important. One common misunderstanding is that we are some sort of technical agricultural education ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The year 2015 was a momentous one for PLAAS. It marked twenty years since the day that PLAAS started off as an organisation with some generous start-up funding from the Ford Foundation. PLAAS started life small: initially ...

This Act is most commonly associated with the consolidation of the colonial ‘land grab’, which had gathered force during the previous 200 years, and with helping to create the framework for the infamous ‘Black Spot ...