In the Shadow of Policy. Robert Ross
rights, and land redistribution). Policy is also about the power and knowledge to (re)define what constitutes resources: where they originate from (for example, the market), as well as how to deploy and how to redistribute the wealth emanating from their use (Peach and Constatin 1972; Ribot and Peluso 2003). State policies manifest and are transmitted as programmes (such as the social grants and welfare schemes, the Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development programme and the Massive Food Production Programme in the Eastern Cape) that define the key resources for development, often in the form of packages and services (Ferguson 1990; Mango and Hebinck 2004), and to make them available to beneficiaries and safeguard their (re)production. Policies are also supported and legitimised by a range of laws which become real as rules and regulations, acts and decrees.
3 Neo-liberalism and the role of the state
Neo-liberalism has thus become an important dimension that shapes the current debate, in South and southern Africa as well as in Brazil. The importance is, as Cousins argues in chapter 3, that neo-liberalism has provided the organising framework for the transition from apartheid to post-apartheid and the reforms ensuing from that process. Embracing neo-liberalism is a matter of political choice and orientation – the ANC has embraced neo-liberalism (Habib and Padayachee 2000) – as well as a matter of economic strategy – the deregulation of the agricultural sector which is embedded in the historical position the South African economy occupies in the global economy. But is the impact of neo-liberalism pervasive and determining, or is it only shaping land reform practices, and what ambiguities have transpired? Wolford (2010) examined the outcomes of neo-liberalism for land reform in Brazil: the marriage between the state and MST turned out to be not an easy one, not necessarily pro-poor, and often ended up as privileging the most powerful, thereby reinforcing prior inequalities, a phenomenon also pointed out by Thiesenhusen (1989b). South Africa is a good example of what the obscurities are when development policies are situated in a neo-liberal economic policy context. There is, on the one hand, a considerable reliance on (and belief in) the market and on development ideas, models and technologies that are often, but not exclusively, externally sourced and that do not resonate well with local conditions and experiences. On the other hand, there remains a considerable degree of state influence on reforming the conditions for agricultural production in communal agriculture. The role of the state in beneficiary selection is not left to the market but is also embedded in paternalistic practices. Land reform has certainly retained populist tendencies and low-ranking officials (extension workers and bureaucrats) often try to find options outside the market by bringing beneficiaries under the ambit of the state, or find ways to use land reform brokerage space for themselves (James 2007, 2011; and chapters 6, 8 and 9, this volume).
Whereas the practice in Brazil is that social movements mediate in the selection of beneficiaries (Wolford 2010), South African experiences are rather different. This book provides ample evidence of the dynamics involved in the self-selection approach adopted and implemented by the South African Department of Agriculture (DOA 2001) from the start, and continued by the current Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR). Beneficiaries apply for land reform grants, and since 2001, in the context of policy changes envisaged in the Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development (LRAD) programme, beneficiaries themselves have to contribute, either in kind or in cash. The experiences can be summed up as a combination of beneficiaries pooling their cash and/or in-kind resources (‘renting a crowd’), financial viability criteria to engage with commercial agriculture (Cousins and Scoones 2010), and a continuation of a system of patronage steered by state officials (Wegerif 2004). Chapter 3 reflects critically on the process; chapters 8 and 9 show how self-selection works out at the grass roots. Moreover, the practices of planning and beneficiary selection of the Department of Land Affairs (DLA), the provincial departments of agriculture and the current DRDLR, with regard to reviving and transforming communal agriculture, reveal continuities with their apartheid-era predecessors, the Department of Native Affairs and the Native Agricultural and Lands Branch. The book is ample evidence of continuities as embedded in state institutions’ approaches to planning (see point 7), personnel, relationships and policy languages (see points 4, 5 and 6). This has remained despite the movement of many former NGO staff into the state’s institutions.
4 Gap between discourse and practice
There is a considerable gap between discourse and practice. This can be explained with reference to the nature of the state, or rather governance practices, but it also has much to do with the strong belief that development can be planned through the implementation of policies. The governance dimension is elaborated in the next section. Here we consider planned development policies from the central argument that policies are seldom translated as designed. Policies are not blueprints (Roe 1991) nor do they follow a coherent, linearly implementable script which is laid out by the state and its experts (Hebinck and Shackleton 2011; Long 2004b; Scott 1998). Two processes are important to consider in this respect.
First, projects on paper ‘have little in common with the project itself as it exists in practice, once into the hands of the people to whom it is destined’ (De Sardan 2006: 4). Development interventions inevitably encounter and simultaneously give rise to emerging and robust practices that attempt to redesign or oppose and sometimes blatantly resist them. We observe in South Africa, for instance, that land reform beneficiaries become disenchanted with the land reform process and/or that resource use does not follow the expert-designed business models, often leading to a particular entanglement of practices and new resource use patterns. Chapters 4–10 in the second part of this book show that land reform beneficiaries do not simply sit back and wait for ‘development’ to be delivered to them in the form of post-settlement support; instead they actively redesign post-settlement support by contesting expert-designed business plans. Beneficiaries try to make things work for themselves even though their efforts might be contested by the state and their fellow beneficiaries, often for different reasons. Similar processes are documented in the third part of the book, in chapters 15–20.
Second, policies are frequently (re)negotiated and rewritten by policymakers and are redesigned in the context of consultations and negotiations between the various representatives of state institutions, farmers’ organisations, politicians, political parties, NGOs, bilateral foreign aid donors, World Bank experts, private consultants and agribusiness companies. Nor is there always consensus within and among state institutions and the policy community itself about the future and direction of land and agrarian reform (Cousins 2007; Hall 2004; Lahiff 2007; Van den Brink 2003). Land and agrarian reform are uncoupled, as Cousins argues in chapter 3. The market-led land reform model (MLAR) appears not to be the vehicle to address the fundamental restructuring of the agrarian economy (Lahiff 2007). The decision of the state, for instance, to deregulate and open up agriculture to global markets had a stabilising effect on the agricultural sector, putting pressure on the profitability of farming (the ‘squeeze on agriculture’ alluded to earlier in this chapter) and in turn negatively impacting on the economic success rates of land reform projects and influencing the extent to which farmers comply with new labour legislation and minimum wage rates. We see large landowners paying wages that are set at a low level, and subsequent increases in the rates have not kept up with increases in the prices of food and fuel. ‘The lack of full enforcement,’ as Naidoo (2011: 206) argues, ‘of the minimum wage leads to … little or no gains for low-paid workers that will alleviate poverty … Moreover, full compliance with minimum wages and increases in the rate of pay may well result in dis-employment.’ The strikes for higher wages by farm workers in the De Doorns region in the Wine District Municipality in the Cape is the most recent manifestation of that process, which was predicted by Ewert and Hamman (1999). In addition, the analyses of Van Leynseele and De Klerk in chapters 5 and 17 in particular critique the notion of a development bureaucracy as a coherent