In the Shadow of Policy. Robert Ross

      1

      Post-apartheid land and agrarian

       reform policy and practices in

       South Africa: themes, processes

       and issues

       Paul Hebinck

      This book critically examines land and agrarian reform policies in post-apartheid South Africa. Notions of land and agrarian reform are well entrenched in the everyday life of a significant number of people in post-apartheid South Africa, as is evident when one visits government departments and meets policymakers and practitioners, attends academic and policy-oriented seminars, reads newspapers and media reports, or interacts directly with land reform beneficiaries and people in villages. What reform actually means for everyday life, however, varies considerably, as do the ways in which we study and understand land and agrarian reform processes. There are contrasting theoretical frameworks; the field of study is inherently multidisciplinary and complex, and varying experiences of historical events and situations colour our interpretations. Moreover, it is often forgotten that agrarian development policies have been designed and implemented in South Africa since the nineteenth century and that the current crop of policymakers had little or no experience in dealing with land and agrarian reform when the reform process started.

      The purpose of the book is neither to provide an extensive review of academic debates, nor to argue that land reform has failed outright to achieve its objectives. Rather, the book aims to set out a number of themes that are drawn from the broader literature on land and agrarian reform as well as from empirical case studies that reconstruct everyday experiences of land and agrarian reform, and how both may inform policy and research agendas. The debates revolve around a number of pertinent issues, informing and shaping the collection of papers brought together in this book. The title of the book – In the Shadow of Policy: Everyday Practices in South African Land and Agrarian Reform – is suggestive of its methodology: by elucidating how a range of social actors (such as policymakers, state officials, beneficiaries, extension workers and so on) involved in the land and agrarian reform process engage with the ideas and actions of policy institutions, we will be able to document, as Long (2004a: 26 ff.) phrases it, ‘how these ideas are transmitted, contested, reassembled, and negotiated at the points where policy decisions and implementations impinge upon the life circumstances and everyday life-worlds of so-called “lay” or “non-expert” actors’. The title also suggests that policies may hide informal and unofficial objectives that, as Ferguson (1990), De Sardan (2006) and many others suggest, intrude on the formally stated objectives. There is always, as much of the book will indicate, a fair degree of rhetoric at play. What drives the momentum of this book, then, is a commitment to making visible what is happening in the fields and homesteads on the land reform projects and what this potentially means for different actors in different places in South Africa. This is intimately linked to the debate on the land question (Bernstein 2004, 2007; Ntsebeza and Hall 2007; O’Laughlin et al. 2013). With Hammar (2007), I argue that there is a plurality of co-existing land and agrarian questions articulating with one another within specific sites, and across space and time. This in turn urges us to rethink the land question; the book sets out to provide empirical data for that.

      The title specifically reflects the three major aims of the book:

      •to illuminate the interactions between the role and position of the state and its assumed capacity to design and implement policies;

      •to elucidate whether and how the actions derived from these interactions resonate meaningfully with everyday realities. As the book documents, there is a lot more going on at grass-roots level and in the villages than is often assumed by state officials, policymakers and experts;

      •to contribute to the debate on land and agrarian reform beyond the South African experiences by unpacking and analysing how policies and everyday practices get intertwined and mutually shape each other.

      This analysis identifies a number of important analytical issues for the debate on how to study land and agrarian reform processes and practices.

      This chapter briefly reviews some of the major emerging themes within land and agrarian reform processes. It explains the structure of the book and provides an overview of the themes addressed in each chapter. Drawing on these provides substantial scope for both a synthesis of arguments and the formulation of a number of methodological points of departure for further analysis and debate in the study of land reform and agrarian change.

      Land and agrarian reform: themes and topics

      How to understand and design land reform has generated heated debates between scholars and practitioners. The nub of this book is that land and agrarian reform are both needed in view of the high degree of rural and urban poverty, and the socio-economic and political inequalities that largely, but not exclusively,