Biography:
Prof. du Toit focuses on the political economy of poverty and policy discourses in South Africa.He graduated from the University of Stellenbosch before proceeding to complete his doctoral thesis at the University of Essex in 1996 on discourses of paternalism on Western Cape wine and fruit farms. Prof. du Toit has developed policy and institutional capacity in the restitution programme of the Department of Land Affairs (DLA), training DLA and Commission on the Restitution of Land Rights officials and facilitating the development of organisational capacity.
He co-ordinated a ministerial review of the restitution process that recommended sweeping changes to the implementation of the programme and a shift away from a court-oriented adversarial system to a primarily administrative one. He has done extensive research on the politics and sociology of poverty and equitable change on commercial farmlands, particularly in the Western Cape, focussing on the social relations of labour, and of the transformative potential of fair trade, supermarket codes and BEE.
His current research focuses on the dynamics of chronic poverty and vulnerability in urban-rural linkages, and on the conceptual and methodological issues involved in the measurement and analaysis of structural poverty and vulnerability. Prof. du Toit leads the qualitative component of the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS), and was one of the organisers of the Living on the Margins conference held in March 2007.
Education:
- MA (Stell)
- PhD (Essex)
Bottom-up Engagement in Policy-Making Affecting Rural Areas: The State of Rural Civil Society