In the Shadow of Policy. Robert Ross
own capital, those that contribute in kind to acquire a farm, and ‘collective property associations’. Experience also informs us about non-land reform beneficiaries looking for opportunities, which were previously almost non-existent, to somehow access land. These terms are used alongside the terms for existing social categories, such as ‘commercial’ and ‘subsistence’ farming and ‘small-’ and ‘large-scale’ farmers. It cannot be denied that the state has deployed key resources in its efforts to generate rural transformation. It should be noted, however, that budgets have been very small relative to the scale and complexity of the problem (Aliber and Hall 2012). The state has made new policies and passed land laws and acts. Because of land reform and land restitution people can now acquire land. The controls on the movement of labour have been removed. Post-settlement support is organised and, notwithstanding the critique (Aliber and Hall 2012), it has created opportunities – perhaps only for some well-situated beneficiaries – to engage with markets and access loans, inputs and technology.
9 History and processes of transformation
History as a complicating factor and context runs throughout the book. As Ross argues in chapter 11, land reform in certain areas in the Cape has not resulted in the deracialisation of land ownership because of intricate historical factors. Lahiff (2011) presents a similar argument. Rights to land continue to be vested in the hands of men while their spouses work the land in their absence. This leads Kleinbooi to assert in chapter 13 that women’s rights to land are not being addressed in an appropriate manner. Moreover, as Kingwill shows in chapter 12, when land laws conjugate customary and common-law notions of ownership, the historical complexities of customary claims become even greater. Historical processes of transformation, such as the de-agrarianisation processes referred to by Hebinck and Van Averbeke (chapter 14) and Fay (chapter 18), complicate the current attempts of the state to resuscitate agriculture. Although there are considerable local differences, it is appropriate to refer to the majority of rural African people as rural dwellers or villagers, and not as peasants, smallholders, communal farmers or farmers sensu strictu. We are often dealing with what F. Wilson (1975) characterises as an ‘industrial proletariat domiciled in the country’, and what Beinart (2001) refers to as a ‘pensionariat’. Along with retrenched workers and urban drifters, pensioners make up the largest proportion of people in many villages; this varies sharply, however, across regional contexts.
10 Social heterogeneities
It would be a mistake to treat land reform and rural development processes homogeneously and the beneficiaries as an undifferentiated group of social actors. Several chapters, notably those by Marais, Moseki, Taoana, Phetlhu and Khutswane, provide detailed accounts of how existing social inequalities (based, for example, on the ownership of resources such as livestock, capital and contacts, but also on gender and age) among groups of beneficiaries shape land reform dynamics and outcomes. Post-apartheid forms of inequality are strengthened by the politics of land reform, especially since the state distinguishes between beneficiaries and/or non-beneficiaries. The much alluded-to intrinsic problems of the collective property associations (James 2007) and the ‘rent-a-crowd strategies’ (Lahiff 2007) of some of the beneficiaries, aimed at expanding and strengthening their control over assets, undermine the ability of people to devise commonly shared strategies and result in struggles and disenchantment, and winners and losers. Existing inequalities, based on assets and skills, are strengthened. At the same time collective property organisations and the rent-a-crowd strategies that have given shape to land and agrarian reform in South Africa were imposed by the state and state officials to achieve results and to show the public that land reform proceeds as planned. The social forms and strategies also emerged to achieve, with the limited state grants that have become available, scales of operation that would fit with their idea of commercial agriculture.
Conclusion
This chapter has provided a summary as well as a synthesis of the book against the background of some of the major theoretical and empirical lessons land and agrarian reform processes have generated in South Africa as well as elsewhere in the world. Land and agrarian reform does not unfold as a neat and straightforward process; societies in which reform is launched and bureaucracies and states that give hands and feet to these processes appear far more complex than is often assumed or dreamed of. The lessons learned from land reform are synthesised in a series of conceptual starting points; these help us to disentangle the complexities, ambiguities and contradictory realities and experiences that land and agrarian reform has generated and will continue to generate.
In the Shadow of Policy conveys many ideas and suggestions. By making a distinction between policies and (everyday) practices, it offers scope to study the discrepancy between theory and policy (that is, design and implementation, including budgeting) and practice (what is implemented, how and by whom, and how reworked by beneficiaries). It reflects on the politics of land and agrarian reform and challenges those involved to ensure a genuine role for reforms on the political agendas of governments and international development agencies. What is questioned is whether these agendas take note of the realities at grass-roots level and whether an organised social movement is there to channel land reform processes. In the Shadow of Policy simultaneously critically engages with the assumptions that the South African state has the capacity to provide budgets, to design meaningful programmes and to deliver services to beneficiaries. The experiences of reform that are elucidated in this book severely critique that capacity. Yet the idea that beneficiaries sit back and wait for government to deliver, and do not enact development, is not in line with the findings from empirical research in South Africa’s rural areas. At the same time, land reform experiences are varied and heterogeneous, from both a social and a livelihood point of view. But beneficiaries do not become disenchanted only with the process; elites ‘capturing’ benefits for themselves, internal fights, abuse and new forms of social inequalities signify that beneficiaries contest the socio-political spaces of land reform.
This chapter has provided food for thought about land reform policy and practices and has captured land and agrarian reform policies, practices and processes as messy and often as unordered. When we begin to view land reform as messy and structurally unordered, new modes of thinking, new designs and social action are required. In the Shadow of Policy provides some ideas to facilitate progress beyond rhetoric.
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