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 institution; state officials in fact act as brokers navigating between various interests and positions (see also James 2011). Taoana, in chapter 8, and Phetlhu, in chapter 9, problematise the brokerage role of extension officers. The implication of these processes is that the state does not act as a monolithic, Weberian institution. Rather, it has multiple layers which act according to their own interpretations of the state’s reform discourse, which often turn out to be contrasting interpretations of state policies, directives and objectives. Next to the state there are many other coordinating mechanisms and practices that shape the dynamics and outcomes of land and agrarian reforms. This helps to explain why policies generate unexpected and perhaps unwanted outcomes in practice.
5 Governance practices
‘The will to’ initiate, to partially quote Li (2007), new forms of governance and citizenship that might be expected to come about in periods of change such as the post-apartheid era in South Africa has not (yet) really come to fruition. Innovative policy processes, as explored by McGee (2004), that would be capable of replacing and transforming colonial and apartheid-era policy-planning mechanisms have not emerged since 1994. Several observers and commentators have criticised (agrarian) policy and its implementation in, for instance, the Eastern Cape. Hadju (2006) points to the still existing unequal power relations between policymakers and local actors, leaving the latter with the feeling that they have limited control over their own fate. The homeland style of governance is reproduced rather than discontinued. Monde (2003) notes that the record of the post-1994 interventions to promote agriculture in the former homelands is long on new initiatives but short on measurable success stories. Both Ainslie (2005) and Kepe (2002) argue that the Eastern Cape Department of Agriculture has failed to table a comprehensive and consistent livestock development plan.
It is not just the state and its prostrate institutions, as Scott (1998) labels and understands them, that require critical analysis. Civil society organisations, social movements (such as the Landless People’s Movement; see James 2007 for a critical view on LPM and Greenberg 2004 for a glorifying assessment) and NGOs also appear to be ineffective and incapable of leading the reform ‘from below’ that Rosset (2006) and Borras (2008) call for. The few experiences with mobilisation, such as the land occupations in Mahlahluvani, are not organised into any movement that even NGOs engage with, let alone the state (Wegerif 2010). In addition, as some of the chapters (notably chapters 6, 9 and 16) elucidate, processes through which elites capture development potentials at village or project level colour the outcomes of the reforms.
6 The knowledge base of policy
All actors construct knowledge and they do so in different and contrasting ways. Not all knowledge, but particular bodies of knowledge, however, feed and shape the policy process. Policies are generally informed by knowledge generated by experts and scientists that derive from ill-conceived assumptions about empirical (rural) realities and development that have not been tested in the conditions in which the policies will be applied. Such knowledge results in received wisdoms, which, as Leach and Fairhead (2000) argue, lead to erroneous interpretations of urban and rural change in Africa and also to ‘bad’ or ill-informed policy choices. This helps to explain why most development policies fail to bridge the gap between the perceptions of the experts and the day-to-day experiences of people at grass roots (Keeley and Scoones 2003; McGee 2004; Scoones 1992). Moreover, the national statistics that inform policies are not always reliable, available and up to date (Jerven 2010), and frequently fail to adequately reflect developmental trends at grass-roots level. One of the most influential pieces of ‘received wisdom’ that today shapes land and agrarian reform practices is that agricultural development in communal areas can be realised only by following the ‘commercial’ farming model (Cousins and Scoones 2010; Scoones 1992), which adopts strict notions of what constitutes the agrarian. The latter is brought to the fore in chapters 14, 17, 19 and 20. Scott (1998) describes this phenomenon as ‘seeing like a state’, which reinforces the critical conclusion various chapters draw that the land and agrarian reform policies have not taken into account how land reform beneficiaries – ‘communal farmers’, women, youth and pensioners, understand and enact development. In their response to past and present state interventions, their ability to redesign programme components and their autonomous practices, local actors expose the limitations of policymakers’ assumptions about contemporary rural realities, questioning in turn the capacity of the state
