‘I don’t want to go back to the farm’: A case study of Working for Water beneficiaries

Abstract

In addition to clearing invasive alien plants, the Working for Water (WfW) Programme, as a South African government public works programme, provides short-term employment and training to empower the poor in finding alternative employment within the labour market. Several studies indicate that its beneficiaries become financially dependent on WfW projects and tend to be reluctant to leave the programme. The sociological reasons for this reluctance, however, remain largely unstudied. We therefore address this gap by reporting on a case study of four WfW projects in the Western Cape Province. Face-to-face interviews with beneficiaries suggest that a number of push and pull factors contribute to their dependency on WfW. Chief among these factors is a fear among previous farmworkers of returning to farm work. It was found that the latter can be linked to a historical power-relations legacy between landowners and farmworkers, mainly created by institutional racism still prevailing on many Western Cape farms. These findings bear important implications for the implementation of a new draft WfW policy aimed at encouraging private landowners to employ WfW beneficiaries on their land as clearers of invasive alien plants.

Silencing Agency in Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) by Essentializing a Neoliberal ‘Monster’ Into Being: A Response to Fletcher & Büscher's ‘PES Conceit’

“…Insisting on neoliberal frameworks as principal drivers of PES in Vietnam obscures that PES has become a non-conditional, Keynesian-type social welfare program of cash transfers that households understand as reconfirming their historic relationship to the state and the importance of rural upland spaces to national development. Other cases of alterations to the rationales and practices of PES governance leading to the failure of neoliberal logics include a series of large-scale PES programs in China, which shares much of Vietnam's state socialist history (Yin et al, 2013;Kolinjivadi and Sunderland, 2012), the Working for Water program of the Republic of South Africa, labelled as PES for reasons of political expediency but structured as a public works and employment generation program (Buch and Dixon, 2009;Hough and Prozesky, 2013), and the Bolsa Floresta program of Amazonas State in Brazil modelled after a federal poverty reduction and social development program, Bolsa Familia, providing a suite of subsidies and assistance for local public works, strengthening of governance, capacity building, and other social programs (Bakkegaard and Wunder, 2014).…”