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 example, legal restrictions to ownership and 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
