In the Shadow of Policy. Robert Ross
grants are provided to financially assist smallholders. The MFPP’s record, Klara Jacobson argues, is meagre and she offers an explanation based on an analysis of how policymakers perceive and understand smallholder or communal agriculture. She unpacks the MFPP discourse by making use of MFPP documents and interviews with policymakers. Case material from three villages provides background data on smallholder agriculture and how the MFPP plan works in practice.
Chapter 16, by Zamile Madyibi, elaborates the MFPP as a planned development intervention which strongly reminds one of the homeland policies. He considers the theoretical assumptions that underpin the MFPP. The chapter explores the multiple realities of the rural Eastern Cape province to show the different ways in which beneficiaries have accommodated the MFPP in their agricultural activities. Three selected cases reflect the different labour patterns and land tenure systems that prevail in the province. The analysis shows the MFPP as rigidly adhering to ideas connected with economies of scale and the pursuit of state-driven green-revolution-style strategies. The MFPP has largely strengthened the trend set in motion in the 1930s, whereby a few elites manage to combine wage income with cultivating more land and obtaining high(er) yields.
Henning de Klerk describes, in chapter 17, the implementation of the Siyazondla Homestead Food Production Programme in Mbhashe. He takes the experiences of women’s groups, who see themselves as prospective participants and beneficiaries, as a starting point to analyse Siyazondla. De Klerk convincingly argues that unfulfilled expectations and experiences of exclusion have a major impact on social relationships among homestead food producers at village level and on the relationships between homestead food producers and local Department of Agriculture (DOA) officials. This needs to be taken into account in debates about governance and development interventions at local municipal level, particularly when these aim at outcomes that are sustainable in the long run.
Derick Fay’s chapter 18 offers another perspective on the dynamics of Siyazondla, by including the Child Support Grant (CSG). Since 1998, CSG has expanded to reach nearly two-thirds of the households in Hobeni, while Siyazondla began to assist households in southern Hobeni in 2007, with production inputs and training. Fay engages in this way with two debates: the potential of direct cash transfers and the potential of subsidised inputs for smallholders to serve as strategies for rural development and poverty alleviation. Fay’s analysis draws on ethnographic fieldwork and points at both recent change – a sharp decline in the cultivation of remote fields since 1998 – and long-term continuities – the expansion and intensification of cultivation in homestead gardens. Concurrently, the contribution of formal employment to livelihoods has declined considerably, while the contribution of welfare has expanded.
Chapter 19, by Wim van Averbeke and Jonathan Denison, provides an insightful overview of smallholder irrigation in South Africa, with a particular focus on the Cape provinces, and shows clearly that irrigation cannot be disconnected from years of racial segregation policies. They explore the factors that play a role in the success of smallholder irrigation. These include a range of interventions driven by conflicting objectives, the limited role of agriculture in rural people’s livelihoods, and the legacy of apartheid that continues to cause exclusion from input and output markets. These factors are critical but often ignored.
The last chapter, by Ntombekhaya Faku and Paul Hebinck, explores the tensions and dynamics generated by the reintroduction of Nguni cattle in the Eastern Cape. Nguni projects are meant to address some of the colonial and apartheid legacies and to transform communal area livestock farming. Laudable as this goal might be, a critical examination of the Nguni project reveals that planners fail to take into account the fact that communal farmers’ view of cattle stems from experience and knowledge that has been accumulated over long periods of time. These include the experience of past state efforts to ‘upgrade’ their herds. In contrast to rural realities, projects like the Nguni projects work within a fixed time frame of about eight years and draw their knowledge from a mixture of scientific and idealistic, even romantic, views.
Themes, points of departure and synthesis
The themes and pertinent issues that emerge from the chapters together present a vivid picture of contemporary land reform dynamics experienced in South Africa. These themes can be recapped and synthesised as follows:
•there is a considerable discrepancy between policy discourse and practices;
•next to discontinuities, continuities in official thinking remain a predominant feature of institutional repertoires and intervention practices;
•processes of social differentiation and unequal power relations include relations of class, gender and competing intergenerational interests;
•beneficiaries contest, reassemble and negotiate land and agrarian reform policies;
•multiple and diverse livelihood strategies continue to be important.
These processes and practices are hardly recognised in contemporary land and agrarian reform models. I would argue that what emerges from the experiences documented and analysed in this book is that the state and its support network of experts is unable to engage meaningfully, through its land and agrarian reform policies and programme design, with the action space of people at the local level (for example, in villages and land reform projects) and is equally unable to tackle the inherited structural inequalities in the agricultural sector. In constructing such an argument I will elucidate some key analytical and methodological points of departure for the analysis of land and agrarian reform and agrarian change at the same time as I synthesise the findings of the book at a more abstract, theoretical level. These are multidimensional, overlapping points which I number below in order to facilitate cross-referencing.
1 Policy, processes and practices
Studying the discrepancy between policy and practice requires making a distinction between (land and agrarian) development as a field of policy and development as a practice and a set of processes (Keeley and Scoones 2003; McGee 2004; Van der Ploeg et al. 2012). Land and agrarian development as a practice refers to the many grass-roots level activities, that is, what happens in communal area farming and on land reform farms and projects. Processes refers to the aggregate flows that are constituted by the many development practices; policies denotes the coordinated efforts of the state and its bureaucracy to stimulate, direct, attempt to control, regulate and govern development practices (Ferguson 1990; Li 2007; Scott 1998). State policies are rooted in discourses of development that believe that economic growth, social change and the reduction of poverty can be achieved through the design and implementation of a series of concrete, time-bound development policies and intervention programmes; this is debated in the literature as ‘planned development’ (De Sardan 2006; Long 2001; Long and Van der Ploeg 1989). The leading role of the state in development assumes a coherent bureaucracy; the analyses of the empirical material brought together in this book clearly challenge such Weberian assumptions about state bureaucracies (see also point 3 below).
2 Policy as narrative and the centrality of resources
Policies usually come into being as broadly stated narratives which have the capacity to mobilise the state to act and allocate public resources (Grindle and Thomas 1991; Keeley and Scoones 2003). These narratives are formulated not exclusively by policymakers, bureaucrats and politicians but also by well-situated beneficiaries, corporate interests, organised labour, practitioners, consultants, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), churches, and so on. The outcome and nature of political processes shape which of the narratives make it to an accepted and shared discourse of development that forms the core of state policies.
Policy essentially is about tangible and non-tangible resources (such as land, markets, capital, knowledge, agricultural inputs, sociocultural repertoires, memories, and so on). Policies entail (re)distribution, preventing or smoothing, and privileging access to resources (for