Objectives:

1. To document and analyse legislation, policies, discourses and practices affecting farm tenure relations.
2. To document and analyse the impact of land reform on farm workers and farm dwellers, as beneficiaries and as non-beneficiaries.
3. To document the links between policy, farm economy and tenure security of farm workers.
4. To document and understand actors’ motives, responses to past policies and discourses regarding tenure security, vulnerability, and responsibility and strategies of change.
5. To discuss, examine and apply social justice perspectives on farm worker / farm dweller tenure.
6. To suggest strategies to improve tenure security and livelihoods for farm workers and farm dwellers, seen within the social and economic viability of farms.

Methods:

1. A literature and policy review, including major South African studies, and paying attention to discourses of justice and agricultural development.
2. National and/or provincial level interviews with key resource persons in the Department of Land Affairs, political leaders and farmers’ organisations.
3. A comparative study of districts in respectively Eastern Cape and Limpopo Provinces. In each of these sites the study will include:

• In-depth study of a purposive sample of four to six farms falling within two districts, to track and quantify changes in production, economic performance, employment, farm and tenure history; interview with owners and employees; individual biographies of selected farm owners and workers; documentation (examples) of networks or connections between kin/friends and other places; photo documentation and farm maps / sketches.

• Documenting eviction cases on these farms, and discuss a selection of these with the actors, perhaps including review of court cases;

• Participatory learning exercises with a small group of farm owners and employees (separately and possibly together) on causes and strategies to improve policy, tenure security, farming and human relations.

• Interview with key local resource persons (eg. agricultural advisors, NGO staff and magistrate courts)

• Interview with selected displaced households, perhaps in informal settlements.