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…
Read More 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…
Read More 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…
Read More Moenieba Isaacs & Emma Witbooi (2019). Fisheries crime, human rights and small-scale fisheries in South Africa. (Marine Policy).
Marine fisheries play an important role in ensuring food security and providing livelihoods in South Africa, as in many other developing coastal States. Transnational fisheries crime seriously undermines these goals. Drawing on empirical research this contribution highlights the complexity of law enforcement at the interface between low-level poaching and organised crime in the small-scale fisheries sector with reference to a…
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