Ben Cousins, Director

The Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) focuses on the land restitution and redistribution programmes initiated by the post-apartheid democratic state; land tenure reform; emerging regimes of natural resource management; rural livelihoods and farm-household production systems; chronic poverty and rural development; and processes of institutional restructuring and reorientation in support of land and agrarian reform in South Africa. The main activities of PLAAS are research, support to national policy development, training, post-graduate teaching, commissioned evaluation studies, and advisory and facilitation services.

The university’s mission statement commits it to ‘responding in critical and creative ways to the needs of a society in transition’, and to ‘helping build an equitable and dynamic society’– commitments taken very seriously by staff at PLAAS. The year 2000 saw our researchers beginning to engage with policy on land and local government reform in a more public manner than in the past (when they tended to do so in ‘backroom’ and advisory roles), and to adopt a more adversarial stance towards government.

Concerned that new policies will benefit emerging entrepreneurs at the expense of the rural poor (in practice if not rhetoric), and autocratic traditional leaders rather than rural citizens, we have written articles for the popular media, appeared on radio programmes, debated with government officials at workshops, and engaged in advocacy on key policy questions. Together with non-governmental organisations, PLAAS staff have promoted the formation of a civil society alliance on land and agrarian reform. The general thrust of this policy advocacy has been to stress the importance of land and agrarian reforms that directly address deeply rooted rural poverty and inequality, while strengthening an embryonic local democracy.

Is this kind of public engagement at odds with the traditional emphasis at universities on teaching, learning and research undertaken within a spirit of scientific enquiry? In our view it is not, but we do recognise the inherent tension between the two stances. We are equally committed to rigorous, independent and open-minded research, to debate and potential disagreement amongst ourselves, and to admitting the possibility of error or mistaken judgement in both research and policy advocacy. Critical scholarship needs to be self-critical; both vigour and rigour are required for informed public debate.

By participating in democratic processes of argument and counter-argument in a variety of public arenas, academics have an important contribution to make to the health of our new democracy – but they must have done their homework. A primary goal at PLAAS remains, therefore, the strengthening of capacity for high quality applied social science research in the land reform, rural development and natural resource management sectors, and making strong policy recommendations on the basis of analytically sound and empirically informed research.

Research findings and policy recommendations need to be communicated to make an impact, and PLAAS devotes considerable resources to its publishing programme. The year 2000 saw the publication of our first book, At the crossroads: Land and agrarian reform in South Africa into the 21st century, in collaboration with the National Land Committee. Seven chapters have PLAAS researchers as authors or co-authors. Research reports and occasional papers continued to appear, as did the Commons Southern Africa newsletter, and the first of a number of PLAAS policy briefs for the influential Natural Resource Perspectives series published by the Overseas Development Institute in London.

A cluster of PLAAS projects and activities centred on the theme of community based natural resource management (CBNRM) have been highly productive over the past year, and helped PLAAS to build an increasingly high profile in this sector. Highlights of 2000 include a well-attended international symposium on governance in regimes of natural resource use, co-hosted with the Centre for Southern African Studies (CSAS) and funded by the Norwegian Embassy, and a regional workshop on legal aspects of CBNRM, attended by participants from ten countries. The collaborative programme of networking and analysis on CBNRM in the region, managed jointly with the Centre for Applied Social Sciences at the University of Zimbabwe, was successful in promoting active exchanges of ideas, information and materials between researchers, fieldworkers and policy makers from a number of southern African countries. This programme provides another context in which scholars from PLAAS and other research institutes are challenged to communicate their ideas in an accessible manner, without compromising their complexity or difficulty – not an easy task at times.

The CBNRM cluster at PLAAS has been enriched by the addition of a second researcher active in the field of marine and coastal resources, Mafa Hara, who was based at CSAS whilst completing his PhD. This research focus area, which may expand in future, benefits enormously from an on-going collaboration with the College of Fisheries Science at the University of Tromsø, Norway, and in particular from the assistance lent by Professors Carl-Erik Schulz and Bjorn Hersoug. Another important partner in this sector is the Environmental Evaluation Unit at the University of Cape Town.

Partnerships with a number of other Norwegian institutions have also been highly productive – in research on communal rangelands in the Eastern Cape, with the Chr. Michelsen Institute, and on governance and trust in natural resource management, with the Department of Administration and Organisation at the University of Bergen. A new programme of exchange and joint research with the Centre for Environment and Development Studies (Noragric) at the Agricultural University of Norway became operational in 2000, and yielded immediate benefits to both institutions: exchange visits took place, an occasional paper was jointly authored, two PhD students initiated research on aspects of human rights and land reform, a high quality status report on land and agrarian reform in South Africa was produced and widely praised, and a fascinating one week field visit on the Norwegian commons was undertaken by a team of South Africans and Norwegians.

Collaboration agreements with sister institutions both locally, in the region, and further afield, are an important vehicle for capacity building within PLAAS. This past year saw two major research projects with institutes in the UK get under way, both funded by the British government’s Department for International Development. One is on the governance and policy process dimensions of sustainable livelihoods in southern Africa, led by the Institute for Development Studies at Sussex University, the other is on chronic poverty and development policy, led by the Institute for Development Policy and Management at the University of Manchester. Both involve a number of other southern partners, and promise to deliver high quality research findings of great policy relevance.

A more modest partnership with the University College of Cork in Ireland saw research undertaken by four Masters students (two South African, two Irish) on aspects of land reform in the Northern and Western Cape.

Short course training of government and non-governmental agency staff remains a key activity at PLAAS, and the year saw a massive expansion of the training programme for the Department of Land Affairs on Integrating environmental planning into land reform process, which is funded by the Danish government. High quality materials were produced, and an independent evaluation rated the training very highly.

The proposed post-graduate Diploma and MPhil in Land and Agrarian Studies was approved by the Committee on Higher Education and will commence in 2001, in close co-operation with academic colleagues from the History department at UWC, from the universities of Cape Town and Stellenbosch, and from the Legal Resources Centre. PLAAS staff continue to provide teaching on land, rural development and natural resource management within a number of other teaching programmes at UWC.

PLAAS has rapidly expanded its activities and staff component since its inception in 1995, and management and administrative systems and procedures have developed in a somewhat ad hoc manner. There is clearly a need to consolidate these systems and lay a solid institutional foundation for the operation of the programme. There is also an urgent need to address the inherent insecurity of tenure of researchers whose salaries depend wholly on contract funding. The year ended with a two-day retreat at which staff debated the problems which have emerged, examined possible ways forward, and decided to establish a Change Task Team to steer PLAAS towards a more sustainable institutional model in 2001. This represents an enormous challenge, but one which we feel confident we can meet given the energy and enthusiasm of the current complement of researchers and administrative staff.