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Land and Water Reforms in South Africa: “Men in White Coats”
Abstract
Despite numerous legislative attempts to redress past injustices, the redistribution of land and/or water remains a key challenge in post-apartheid South Africa. South Africa is currently identified as being in a state of a water crisis – and there are contentious and deeply polarized viewpoints on how the water security situation is linked to the transformation agenda. Through the narrative of an “emerging” female black farmer’s experiences with land and water reforms, this article gives a first-person account of the institutional barriers that keep intact an unequal, inequitable and unjust agrarian structure. The analysis also makes explicit how the transformatory agenda does not address the complexity of inequalities by race, crosscut as they are by gender and other social variables. By aiming to integrate an erroneously conceived homogeneous formerly excluded in an agrarian system meant to exclude them, the post-apartheid land and water reforms not only fail, but in turn make the formerly excluded “failed”. These analyses suggest that a feminist agenda which calls for a structural overhaul of policies and strategies as well as institutional structures and cultures might provide a much-needed antidote to the de-railed reform/justice agenda in South Africa.
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Presented initial findings from the project.
Redistribution of land is widely seen as having the potential to significantly improve the livelihoods of the rural poor and to contribute towards economic development. Nine years into the transition to democracy, however, the underlying problems of landlessness and insecure land rights remain largely unresolved. In line with its neo-liberal macro-economic policy, the approach of the ANC-led government to land reform has been based on the use of free-market mechanisms, tightly controlled public spending and minimal intervention in the economy – the so-called market-based, demand-led approach. To date, this has made little impact on the racially skewed distribution of land in South Africa. Agricultural land remains overwhelmingly under white ownership. The government’s redistribution policy has undergone a number of shifts since 1994. This study provides an overview of the government’s land redistribution programme since 1994 and pays particular attention to the LRAD programme.
This article traces the history of integrated water resources management (IWRM) in South Africa since the 1970s. It examines IWRM according to its three common pillars, which are also reflected in South Africa's National Water Act: economic efficiency, environmental sustainability, and equity. The article highlights how the principles of economic efficiency and the environment as a user in its own right emerged under apartheid, while equity was only included in the post-1994 water policies, with evolving influence on the other two principles. In 2013, the Department of Water Affairs overcame the widely documented flaws of IWRM by adopting developmental water management as its water resource management approach, aligning with the political and socio-economic goals of South Africa's democratic developmental state.
This book assesses the institutional, technical and market constraints as well as opportunities for smallholders, notably, emerging farmers in disadvantaged areas such as the former homelands of South Africa. Emerging farmers are previously disadvantaged black people who started or will start their business with the support of special government programs. Public support programs have been developed as part of the Black Economic Empowerment strategy of the South African government. These programs aim to improve the performance of emerging farmers. This requires, first and foremost, upgrading the emerging farmers skills by providing access to knowledge about agricultural and entrepreneurial practices. To become or to remain good farmers they also need access to suitable agricultural land and sufficient water for irrigation and for feeding their cattle. Finally, for emerging farmers to be engaged in viable farming operations, various factors need to be in place such as marketing and service institutions to give credit for agricultural inputs and investments; input markets for farm machinery, farm implements, fertilizers and quality seeds; and accessible output markets for their end products. This book develops a policy framework and potential institutional responses to unlock the relevant markets for smallholders
Participatory research has long held within it implicit notions of the relationships between power and knowledge. Advocates of participatory action research have focused their critique of conventional research strategies on structural relationships of power and the ways through which they are maintained by monopolies of knowledge, arguing that participatory knowledge strategies can challenge deep-rooted power inequities. Other action research traditions have focused more on issues of power and knowledge within organisations, while others have highlighted the power relations between individuals, especially those involving professionals and those with whom they work. Drawing on a longer essay on 'Power and Knowledge', to be published in the Handbook of Action Research (Sage 2007), this article explores the ways in which advocates of participatory research have explored these issues, arguing that it is when participatory approaches to knowledge, action and learning are linked that they have the most potential to challenge power inequities.
Whole issue. Incl. abstracts, bibl. This IDS Bulletin reflects on the contested relationship between feminism and development, and the challenges for reasserting feminist engagement with development as a political project. It arises from the 'Gender Myths and Feminist Fables: Repositioning Gender in Development Policy and Practice' workshop held at the Institute of Development Studies and the University of Sussex in July 2003. Centred on how to "reposition" gender and development, debates pointed to the politics of discourse as a key element in social transformation. Participants explored how, after initial struggles to develop new concepts and languages for understanding women's position in developing societies, feminist phrases came to be filled with new meanings as they were taken up into development policy and practice. Gender's generalities have been both a success and a hindrance. Reflecting on years of effort, articles critique understandings and outcomes of discourse, as well as different views of the pitfalls and compromises of political engagement. Feminist engagement with development has required the embrace of simplifications, and as a result, vigilance and struggle to avoid women being represented as cardboard victims or heroines, in order to capture instead nuances, ambiguities and complexities in their lives and choices. [IDS website]
Can a rights-based agenda potentially challenge the dominant market narrative with respect to water access, and in the process, also address climate change reparations, adaptation and mitigation? Learning from the case of water in the most advanced court challenge to neo-liberal state power that has yet been adjudicated, in Johannesburg in 2009, it is just as likely that rights-talk will be co-opted by neo-liberalism. If that happens more systematically within the climate justice struggle, at a time activism intensifies and court cases emerge more frequently, momentum towards a genuine breakthrough against corporate control of global environmental governance (amplified now under the rubric of the 'Green Economy') could well be distracted, halted or even reversed. The classical problems associated with rights-based narratives - their basis in liberal individualism and disconnection from broader socio-economic and ecological processes - may continue to be crippling, as witnessed in the example of South African water policy, law and activism. The specific case involves a Paris-based water privatisation company (Suez) whose policies in Johannesburg led five Sowetans to sue the city to increase water supply and cease imposing pre-payment meters. The same ideological debates - how to fuse neo-liberal imperatives with rights rhetoric - took centre stage during the June 2012 Rio+20 Earth Summit. There, the dominant trend towards market determinations of nature required a stronger countervailing 'decommodification' narrative than 'rights talk' can offer. The question posed here, is whether using human rights considerations will make contestation of 'neo-liberalised nature' any easier, and the answer arrived at is negative, based on the evidence from Johannesburg. Instead, 'commoning' is the alternative narrative, ie arriving at the commons through and beyond rights.
From Johannesburg's Waterdome to the March 2003 World Water Forum summit in Kyoto to the Cancun World Trade Organization ministerial in September 2003, the conflict over water commodification appears irreconcilable. The WD's water privatization workshop and Kyoto's panel on pro-corporate infrastructure financing were both disrupted by protests. As for Cancun, the day after international demonstrations - including in 18 African cities - on September 13, 2003, negotiations on the General Agreement on Trade in Services bogged down as the summit imploded. Over the same 12-month period, grassroots and labor opposition also compelled the biggest French, British and US water firms to begin a strategic withdrawal from several Third World sites. Another reason was evident in former high-profile privatization pilot projects run by the ubiquitous French firm Suez, from Buenos Aires to Manila, with several South African towns in between. There, currency crashes and worsening inequality meant that even selling as essential a commodity as water to low-income people and returning sufficient profits to Paris had become impossible, due simply to unaffordability.
This article examines the disjuncture between high–level commitments to gender equity and practice in South Africa's land reform programme. Weaknesses in implementing the gender policy of the Department of Land Affairs stem largely from limitations within the broader programme, compounded by the inadequate conceptualization and management of the task and an absence of political accountability around women's land rights by the Department and Ministry. The low political priority accorded gender policy is itself a reflection of weak levels of organization among rural women. However, rural women show an interest in strengthening their rights in land and the small number of women whose households have secured land through the programme regard this as a positive achievement.
PIP
This article critiques theories of development and growth models, which are not compatible with conservation of resources, women's empowerment, and a sustainable society. Affluent societies are using up most of the world's resources in unsustainable ways. Industrial giants have co-opted the term "sustainability." This gender discussion addresses the issue of patriarchal and capitalist systems and presents a new theoretical framework. The author disagrees with the global division of labor, where women are manipulated as producer-housewives and consumer-housewives, and with the global level of violence against women, in general. Gender equality is not viable in the present patriarchal order. In all economic theories, women's work is a free resource and invisible as unpaid housework and nurturing work. The globalization of the economy leads to greater capital and power concentration in the hands of a few. Women are ill served by structural adjustment policies. New global restructuring has improved the welfare of Third World elites. Globalization of capital and new technology makes ethics obsolete. A new economic model must be based on the preservation of life at the center, with livelihood based on wage labor and unpaid work, control of communal assets, and solidarity of communities. Unpaid necessary social labor must be shared by men and women equally. The checklist for change includes, for example, that money would be a means of circulation, not of accumulation. Nature would be reintegrated into economics. There must be new meanings for work, productive labor, economics, the good life, satisfaction of needs, and political structures.
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