Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies
Recent Publications
Climate Change and Rural Livelihoods in South Africa: An Agenda for Policy-Oriented Research
This report sketches the outlines of our research agenda on the intersections of climate change, agrarian change, and rural livelihoods. The report marks an important change for us. For more than twenty-five years we have been documenting the changing nature of rural livelihoods and agrarian relations on this continent, and the transformations wrought by politics, by agricultural commercialisation, value chain…
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Young African Researchers in Agriculture (YARA) Working Paper Series
Jabik, B.B. (2021). Relevant Local Climatic Knowledge for Sustainable Agro-Ecological Practices by Small-Scale Farmers in Northern Ghana Local knowledge on climatic conditions which hitherto was used to predict the likelihood of weather outcomes is under threat of extinction due to lack of documentation coupled with a gradual decline in its knowledge transfer. Using participatory and ethnographic research approaches including focus…
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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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