Investigating continuities and discontinuities is useful for an analysis of changes over time. Continuity is not just a simple, unbroken line of events, but involves a set of institutional and discursive linkages. The paper explores continuities in that relate to the agricultural expert system that has gradually taken shape in South Africa and that plays a prominent role in the design of land reform.The persistence of continuities indicates the extent to which dramatic transformations of the institutional infrastructure in agriculture have occurred, but with fewer changes in its content. Historical and contemporary analysis allows us to underline the continuity of prescriptions and modes of ordering in the past and present, evident in three land and agrarian reform projects in the Eastern Cape.
Post-1994 land reform policies have had limited effects on land use in the communities surrounding Dwesa-Cwebe Nature Reserves in South Africa's Transkei region. Likewise, prior state interventions have largely been resisted and ignored. Instead, community-driven processes, influenced by the regional political economy, have shaped diverse patterns of changes in land use. These relate to the diverse livelihood styles in the area: different patterns of education, labor migration, and consumption have affected local use of land and forest products. Activities planned under land reform, however, may threaten local control of land tenure and use.
The introduction to this set of papers highlights four challenges to the large-scale analysis of population growth at protected area edges in Africa and Latin America undertaken by George Wittemyer and colleagues in their 2008 paper published in Science. First, it raises questions about their sampling procedures, given national-level variation in systems of protected area designation and protected area estates. Second, it challenges the largely economic model of migration decisions that underlies their analysis. Third, it highlights the neglected variable of land tenure systems as a factor facilitating or impeding migration. Fourth, it points to the problematic politics of reducing human communities and polities to 'populations' subject to management from afar.
Even as they cultivate less land, residents of Hobeni, in the former Transkei homeland, describe increasing concerns over land shortage, explaining that disused land has its owners who 'are keeping that land for their children'. This paper examines the social practices that shape rural land tenure, in a setting where traditional authorities bear little relevance to customary tenure. Land in this context holds value not only for agricultural and residential use; it is a resource for rural residents to persuade migrants to maintain their rural ties, in a political-economic context in which migration has become more unstable and insecure. Attention to the attractive value of land as a resource situated in relations between migrants and rural kin also highlights the limits of a narrowly economic perspective on apparently 'underutilised' land: land may be materially 'unproductive' but socially valuable.
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