ABSTRACT
Introduction The objective of this book is to investigate the state of resource use and wellbeing in rural and peri-urban South Africa in the light of the land and agrarian reforms that were initiated after the transition to democracy in 1994. The prospects and emerging properties of land use and reform in South Africa will be analysed against the historical and regional background of southern Africa. The central task of this book is the interrogation of the importance and effectiveness of land reform for enhancing land use options and livelihoods. In particular, this volume presents varied and multi-disciplinary perspectives on the question of whether, and in what ways, these reforms have created new options for the use of land and natural resources. Reform-minded policy in South Africa is based on the assumption that if access to land and the natural resources it supports is made easier and more equitable, then the use of these resources will be intensified, leading to beneficial changes in the structure and dynamics of the conditions that produce rural and urban poverty. A major focus of the volume involves an assessment of whether land and agrarian reform, in addressing the dimension of the ownership of the land, has indeed resulted in the transformed use of natural (i.e. land, crops, cattle, rangeland, wild products and so on) and other strategic resources (labour, knowledge, institutions, networks and so on). The book also addresses the question of whether or not the value communities and households place on and receive from these resources has been enhanced by the reform programme. Property rights and their redistribution are crucial elements in any land reform process. How, though, should we understand these rights? Are they social relationships between people and their resources or are they, as this book aims to show, rather social relationships between people and social institutions, relationships which revolve around the contestation and negotiation of the meaning and utilization of resources? Another key question is whether land reform enables people to use resources efficiently once a series of historical constraints (e.g. restrictive land laws and difficulty of access to markets) have been removed. Are people making use of resources more effectively, more intensely, more freely and more equitability than before and do they rethink and redesign the ways in which they use these resources to fit their livelihood conditions?
