Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies
Recent Publications
Mtero, Gumede & Ramantsima (2019) Elite Capture in Land Redistribution in South Africa. PLAAS Research Report 55.
This report seeks to deepen the understanding of elite capture in land reform and to provide a more comprehensive picture of its causes and consequences. The key overarching questions include: who has benefited from South Africa’s land redistribution? Who have been the winners and losers in land redistribution and why? What are the criteria for beneficiary targeting and selection? The…
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Phillan Zamchiya (2019). Differentiation and development: The case of the Xolobeni community in the Eastern Cape, South Africa
Most agrarian scholars argue that long historic processes of colonialism, capitalist development and implementation of neo-liberal structural policies in Sub-Saharan Africa have resulted in deagrarianisation and its sub-genre of depeasantisation particularly in South Africa. I argue that this long historic process epitomised, in some cases, by abandonment of cropping fields and deactivation of agriculture was uneven between and within communities…
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Andries du Toit (2019). Whose Land Question? Policy deliberation and populist reason in the South African land debate
On 4 and 5 February 2019, the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), along with colleagues from the Universities of Fort Hare and of Rhodes, hosted a national conference entitled Resolving the Land Question: Land redistribution for equitable access to land in South Africa. This paper considers this conference as a case study of ‘policy sense-making’—an attempt to…
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