MUDEN VALLEY LIVELIHOODS PROJECT
SUMMARY
The project builds on prior supportive work in the region by Zibambeleni Rural Resource and Development Project, a local NGO established in 1994, which has campaigned for and assisted poor people in a variety of development projects. Included in these was support for land reform, in terms of which 15 private farms were transferred to poor people, the highest rate of transfer in the country in one of the earliest land redistribution of commercial land projects in South Africa. The land was transferred in private ownership to Trusts as the landholding legal entities.
The aims of improved quality of life remained unrealised, as transfer into ownership has proved an inadequate response in itself to poverty and tenure insecurity. The project is concerned with evaluating the specific causes and sources of disjuncture between access to land and improved livelihoods and service delivery. In other words, the key question is why land ownership has failed to translate into significant improvements in people’s quality of life; indeed this failure is compounded by observations that private tenure has actually impeded people’s access to housing and infrastructure grants and state services as well as many other private sector initiatives because of the argument that people are private land owners and no longer within the ambit of the state’s welfare policies. This somewhat perverse set of circumstances has been shared among a wide variety of land reform beneficiaries across South Africa, and has long been a source of dissatisfaction, in spite of which the problems persist. In this project the problem is to be the subject of detailed enquiry into people’s current livelihood strategies and social organisation in an attempt to isolate particular policy weaknesses that exacerbate poverty and isolation, and which could assist in advocacy and lesson sharing more widely. The project has selected five farms as pilots for detailed and intensive research to shed light on the wider project area and other similar land reform projects in the country. The project area is situated on the edges of communal land in a neighbouring District Municipality where Leap also has a project - Imithetho yomhlaba yase Msinga (Land Laws of Msinga Project)
Interim findings:
Research in pilot studies on 6 land reform farms indicates a complex institutional terrain where decision-making powers around land management and access to resources are complicated by competing state jurisdictions and local authority structures, such as Trust sub-committees and Traditional Authorities. State departments attempt to impose ‘communal’ access and management systems. When it comes to production, attempts to impose co-operative systems are resisted, either actively or passively. The new ownership arrangement, although ‘private’, transfers land to ‘communities’ which does not reflect the way families access and use land locally, which tends to be on a family basis based on local social norms. The tension and irresolution between ‘communal’ and ‘private’ ownership results in institutional paralysis and lack of services and support, as the state support systems are not geared towards the way these combine on land reform farms. There is some evidence that the institutional impasse has contributed to people reverting to chiefly forms of local authority, which however, compete with other local committees established on elective principles that flow from the land holding entity constitutions.
Project Details
NGO Partner:
Zibambeleni Rural Resource and Development Project
Location:
Muden, Mooi River Valley, KwaZulu-Natal
Funder:
International Land Coalition (ILC)
Duration of project: