Research and training: The wider context
Ben Cousins, Director

The wider context of our research and training, and the ultimate rationale for establishing and maintaining a centre such as PLAAS, is the key challenge of deeply entrenched poverty, as well as the inequality to which it is inextricably linked. A majority of citizens in South Africa, as in the wider southern African region, are subject to an on-going crisis of livelihood vulnerability, exacerbated by a raging HIV/Aids pandemic. These realities tend to empty formal democracy of substantive content.

Poverty and vulnerability are deepest in rural areas where the majority of the region’s population still lives. The greatest concentrations of such poverty are in those areas previously designated exclusively for African settlement, the former ‘native reserves’, but poverty is also widespread in the commercial farming sector. This sector has always paid extremely low wages, but has been shedding jobs steadily for the past decade, and what jobs survive are largely casual or seasonal in character. Poverty in both contexts has its origins in colonial policies of land acquisition, settlement and economic development that dispossessed the indigenous majority of their land and created dual and highly unequal political, social, legal and economic regimes. A similar legacy is found in coastal communities in relation to unequal access to marine and coastal resources.

Contemporary rural poverty in southern Africa is thus rooted in an unresolved land question, in which the unequal distribution of land contributes to a dualistic and discriminatory agrarian structure dominated by a (mostly white) commercial farm sector. Linked to the land question is a structure of unequal access to natural resources, including fisheries, forests and wildlife. This is why policies to restructure access to land and natural resources have been put in place by all post-independence governments of the region, and why the failure of efforts to date to transform inherited patterns of ownership and production makes this a powerful symbol of incomplete transformation in society at large.

Urban poverty is also a massive problem, in part a legacy of the apartheid and colonial past, but also the result of persistently high levels of unemployment. It is exacerbated by the steady flow of people from rural to urban contexts in search of better livelihood opportunities. It is now becoming clear that urbanisation on its own is not a solution to poverty and vulnerability – bourgeoning informal settlements surrounding towns and cities are characterised by chronic unemployment, crime, violence, food insecurity and disease.

In the post-liberation era only mixed success has been achieved in national programmes of rural development, land reform and community-based natural resource management (CBNRM). But the more favoured development strategies of encouraging export-led growth in manufacturing industries have not been any more successful in expanding employment and reducing poverty. There is thus an urgent need to reconsider the development orthodoxies that have dominated policy making over the past decade. ‘Fundamental-applied’ research[1] has a vital role to play in informing policy makers about the realities of rural and urban poverty, the changing character of livelihoods, and in drawing appropriate lessons from policies and programmes that have been implemented to date.

Part of the problem is a shortage of appropriate expertise in government and civil society organisations focused on development and poverty reduction. University-based ‘centres of excellence’ can play a part in enhancing the capacity of these organisations, through a combination of post-graduate, academic training and skills development through in-service, short-course training.

The challenge of sustainability

How sustainable are university-based centres and institutes whose primary functions are research and post-graduate training, but rely largely on external sources of funding? PLAAS experience suggests that their leadership, management and administration functions need to be relatively secure and stable, in order to provide a solid institutional base for project-based fund raising. Yet those projects are unable by themselves to cover all the costs of these functions.

The increasing number of such centres, in South Africa and elsewhere in the world, reflect some comparative advantages in the production of socially relevant, cutting-edge, ‘fundamental-applied’ research, over traditional academic research modes that are discipline and department-based (Cooper 2003:6–10). They also have the potential to create strong and mutually beneficial links between research and post-graduate training. But the operational realities of these new units have not yet been adequately recognised and accommodated by the policies, systems and procedures of their host universities, or indeed by national research funding strategies. This ‘structural chaos’ (Cooper 2003:5) poses a serious threat to the long-term survival of these units, and undermines efforts to make the new and the old modes of research and training complementary and mutually beneficial.

Current realities mean that sustaining an externally-funded unit is a difficult balancing act, with little in the way of a safety net. It involves reconciling a number of competing pressures and priorities: raising funds for new projects, recruiting (and retaining) high calibre researchers, to whom only short-term contracts can be offered, to produce high-quality research findings, according to demanding deadlines, that are relevant to the needs of the society and communicated to decision makers in accessible formats, but also published in accredited journals or books. At the same time, units must provide high quality teaching and supervision to post-graduate students, nurturing in particular the talents of those from historically disadvantaged backgrounds. They must also operate their own efficient, in-house administration system in parallel to that of the host institution. Project-related funds can contribute only a proportion of the central institutional costs of such units, and core funding is now extremely difficult to secure.

Some of these pressures are inherent in the character of such units, but there is little doubt that sustainability requires a greater degree of stability and security than obtains at present. System-wide changes in national and university policies and systems and new approaches to research funding are probably needed. In the meantime, centres such as PLAAS must strive to overcome the structural constraints as best they can. The support that we do receive from the university (and in particular our two university-supported posts and the high-quality offices we occupy) is enormously helpful, and we are deeply grateful for it.

A sustainability initiative launched in 2003 seeks to secure for PLAAS additional university posts, endowment grants, and an endowed chair, and some success has been achieved thus far. A notable achievement in 2004 was a contribution of R3 million to the PLAAS Endowment Fund by the Ford Foundation. This we will seek to add to in the course of 2005, the target being a total of R7 million. In addition, PLAAS was awarded a senior lectureship post by the university, and Dr Thembela Kepe was the successful applicant. Thembela was also appointed as PLAAS Deputy Director.

Illustrative of the difficulties inherent in reliance on project funding, there was a temporary hiatus in the flow of project funding in the second half of 2004. Three researchers engaged in short-term consultancy or contract research for this period to secure their salaries without having to rely completely on PLAAS reserves. Unexpected benefits from this experience included researchers venturing into new sectors (such as forestry and local government) and gaining useful experience.

Also vital for sustainability is the ‘inner strength’ of a research centre. In 2004 PLAAS continued to address internal relationships, organisational culture, systems and procedures through an organisational development (OD) process. A grant from the Foundation for Human Rights assisted in securing the expert facilitation services of the Community Development Resources Association (CDRA), and a number of workshops were held throughout the year, culminating in a three-day strategic planning event. A key issue addressed in the OD process was how to strengthen internal support mechanisms for research staff, and young and relatively inexperienced researchers in particular.

Highlights of 2004

This report details the continued productivity of PLAAS researchers, who published 37 journal articles, book chapters, research reports, policy briefs and newspaper articles in 2004. They also presented a total of 67 papers at conferences, workshops and seminars. A new publication series launched in 2004 was a quarterly information bulletin on land reform, Umhlaba Wethu, which has been widely welcomed as a useful source of up-to-date information. The Pan-African Programme on Land and Resource Rights co-ordinated at PLAAS by Munyaradzi Saruchera was highly productive, publishing a high quality collection of papers and six policy briefs. Dr Andries du Toit’s article in Development and Change on social exclusion discourse and poverty was widely praised.

Policy engagement took a wide variety of forms, including submissions to Parliament and commissioned work for the Department of Land Affairs and other government departments. PLAAS staff continued to be called upon to comment on key policy issues in the media. Fisheries researchers at PLAAS (Dr Mafa Hara and Dr Moenieba Isaacs) are receiving increasing recognition as leading social scientists in the sector, and are often called upon to contribute their insights to policy debates.

The PLAAS post-graduate teaching programme continues to recruit students from around the region, but slow rates of student throughput remains a problem we will have to seek innovative solutions to in coming years. Highlights of the PLAAS teaching programme in 2004 were the graduations of PLAAS staff members Moenieba Isaacs (PhD) and Webster Whande (MPhil), as well as the notable achievement of MPhil cum laude student Marc Wegerif in receiving the Division of Lifelong Learning award for the best graduate admitted to the university on the basis of recognition of prior learning. By the end of 2004 a total of six PhD students were registered at PLAAS.

The year 2005 sees PLAAS celebrating ten years of research, training and policy engagement in relation to land and agrarian reform, natural resource management, fisheries and chronic poverty. While doing so we will be reflecting on whether or not we live up to our mission statement, and debating what key issues we should focus on in the decade to come. I have every confidence that the talented and hardworking research and administrative staff currently employed at PLAAS will rise to this challenge.



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[1] Research that ‘investigates problems within the context of application’, and combines an element of ‘curiosity research’ with an element of ‘application-oriented’ research (David Cooper 2003 Unlocking intellectual knowledge: Case studies of research centers/units at universities and technikons of the Western Cape. Report submitted to the Trade and Industrial Policy Secretariat (TIPS)/ International Development Research Centre).