Land Redistribution Research Articles

The socio-economic impact of land redistribution on the beneficiaries in the Greater Kokstad Municipality of South Africa

PurposeThe Government of South Africa, in 1997, embarked on the land redistribution programme in some communities to address the land ownership injustices suffered by indigenous during the apartheid regime. The objective of this study is to assess the socio-economic experiences of communities that have benefitted from the government's land redistribution programme in the Greater Kokstad Municipality in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.Design/methodology/approachThe study employed a qualitative research methodology. The population of interest comprised two communities (Franklin and Makhoba) located within the Greater Kokstad Municipality. A purposefully selected sampling technique was used to select the relevant land beneficiaries to form part of the study's sample. An interview guide made up of both closed-ended and open-ended questions was used to solicit information from the participants.FindingsThe findings revealed that the key social-economic variables, such as the living standards of the beneficiaries, have not yet experienced much improvement. Moreover, it became evident that some socio-economic aspects such as food security, low-cost housing, basic services, wealth (land), transport, infrastructure and training had improved somewhat; although other similar aspects such as total household incomes, unemployment, general community safety and corruption had not improved.Practical implicationsIt can, therefore, be concluded that all socio-economic aspects of beneficiaries' lives had not improved/changed entirely; thus, the experiences of the land redistribution beneficiaries of the Greater Kokstad Municipality represent a mixed bag of major failures and minor successes. The study recommends some policy improvement on the land redistribution programme such as an increase in the combined budgets of the land redistribution and tenure reform programmes and the revision of the proceeds paid to landowners from market value to production value, which if adopted by the government, will help address the deficiencies in socio-economic benefit of the programme to the beneficiaries in the communities.Originality/valueThe findings give an insight into the effectiveness of the government's land redistribution programme to the beneficiaries' socio-economic lives and areas where the government needs to improve to make the project a success. The paper also adds to the literature in terms of knowledge and may serve as a reference for future studies in this area.

Vandalism in castles, Tentors and the enhanced core of the historical Russian city

The article describes the results of the work of the analytical department of an independent security system. The history of the creation of a criminal community at the state and regional levels is presented. The forms and types of work of the members of the criminal community are described. The article is based on an analysis of documents, anonymous sources, conversations with witnesses, self-reflection, etc. After the Second World War, people who, during the war, committed a number of war crimes against civilians by order of military commanders (redistribution of lands, redistribution of money resources, sexual crimes). This task was set thanks to the establishment of contacts with foreign agents who tortured concentration camp prisoners. The criminals released them on the condition of conducting terrorist actions against the Soviet people after the war (economy, social sphere, world order, etc.).

Intruders in a Balancing Act: Black Economic Empowerment, Transitional Justice and Investment Arbitration Tribunals

Abstract This article examines the role of ad hoc investment arbitration tribunals in arbitrating highly sensitive matters in transitional justice contexts, focusing on disputes arising from black economic empowerment (BEE) policies in countries formerly under racially discriminatory regimes. After an overview of the investment protection system, the article introduces the historical context of BEE policies. It subsequently analyses three main disputes, one against South Africa and two against Zimbabwe, where white concession holders and landowners relied on Bilateral Investment Treaties to claim compensation for the consequences of BEE mining and land redistribution policies. These disputes provide a testing ground to shed light on the role of investment arbitration in the context of transitional justice. The article concludes that such a role essentially amounts to an intrusion in the perilous ‘balancing act’ of managing a transitional justice process.

The Effects of Land Redistribution: Evidence from the French Revolution

AbstractThis study exploits the confiscation and auctioning off of Catholic Church property that occurred during the French Revolution to assess the role played by transaction costs in delaying the...

ЕРДАН ФОЙДАЛАНИШ ВА МУҲОФАЗА ҚИЛИШ СОҲАСИДА ДАВЛАТ БОШҚАРУВИНИНГ ИЛМИЙ-ҲУҚУҚИЙ АСОСЛАРИ

The article explains the concept of state management in the sphere of land use and protection, based on the existing legal documents, scientific and theoretical foundations. Also land reform in the Republic of Uzbekistan is treated as one of the main directions of state public administration. The author investigates land management as a type of environmental control and describes organizational and legal basis for land protection in urban planning. The article considers the issues of adoption by government administrationof normative acts on land use and protection on safeguard and rational use of lands; establishment of standards on environmental protection, maintenance of state registration of lands and state cadastre; rational use of lands and planning oftheir protection; distribution and redistribution ofland; landscape design;

The South African Redistribution Imperative: Incongruities in Theory and Practice

AbstractIt has partly been assumed that the constitutional obligation to pay compensation for expropriations is to blame for the slow pace at which land has been redistributed in South Africa. However, this assumption requires careful analysis and reflection, with reference to the imperfections of the policies and laws that set out to address landlessness, as well as the underlying theoretical approach to economic justice. This article questions the purpose for which land reform beneficiaries acquire land, with reference to the role that property should ideally fulfil for the landless. The article makes a number of observations to cast light on why the redistribution of land has been alarmingly slow, where inconsistencies and loopholes exist in the programme, and whether expropriations for nil compensation will make any difference in remedying existing failures in the redistribution programme.

Land redistribution in South Africa’s land reform policy: a better way to select beneficiaries

ABSTRACT South Africa’s land reform policy might succeed better if it had clear criteria for selecting beneficiaries for land redistribution. The National Development Plan identifies the intended beneficiaries and states how they should be selected, but implementation of the plan is haphazard. A 2019 report by the Presidency’s Land Reform and Agriculture Advisory Panel recommends that the beneficiary selection process be clear and transparent. In this paper, we respond to the report and expand on a proposal in the 2020 draft Beneficiary Selection Policy. Our study is based on a review of the relevant policies and the literature on beneficiary selection, and a profile of 833 potential land redistribution beneficiaries randomly selected from three provinces in South Africa. We highlight the flaws in the existing selection methods. Building on the suggestion of Vink and Kirsten (2019) of a tender or job application process, we suggest improvements we suggest improvements that could reduce inefficiencies and make the selection process inclusive and transparent.

Towards a viable farm size – determining a viable household income for emerging farmers in South Africa's Land Redistribution Programme: an income aspiration approach

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to propose an improved methodology to determine a viable farm size for potential emerging farmers as land reform beneficiaries. Land reform in South Africa has been criticised because of poor implementation and slow pace, accompanied by poor productivity in redistributed land. To explain this, it has been suggested that commercial farms are too large for emerging farmers who have little or no experience in commercial farming. Thus, there have been calls for measures to make subdivision of land easier and cheaper. To this end, cross–sectional survey data from 833 potential emerging farmers in three rural provinces are analysed to determine a viable income for emerging farm households as a basis for calculating a viable farm size, using the income aspiration literature, farm household economics theory as a point of departure. Off–farm income, farm income and aspirational income are included in the calculation. The viable income was matched to the existing commercial farm enterprise gross margins per hectare obtained from the Bureau for Food and Agricultural Policy, which are then used as the basis for suggesting “viable farm sizes” for different emerging farm households.

Engels and the Worker–Peasant Alliance

Friedrich Engels’ bicentenary was celebrated in 2020. As a contribution to this celebration, this article argues that Engels, among his various other substantive contributions, must be credited with his conceptualization of the worker–peasant alliance. Given that this alliance was fundamental to democratic and socialist revolutions in the Third World in the twentieth century, and continues to be so in the twenty-first, it remains important to clarify its trajectory within classical Marxism. Engels turned his attention to the sixteenth-century peasant war in Germany so as to illuminate the challenges faced in the course of the 1848 revolutions that swept across Europe. He argued that, for large sections of the peasantry, the throwing off of their feudal yoke required an alliance with the proletariat. This, however, did not mean land redistribution via private landholdings but nationalization of the land. It also did not mean an alliance with the whole of the peasantry. These two questions and the antagonisms that they entailed were central to the development of Marxist theory and practice in the Bolshevik and Chinese revolutions, as well as others in the Third World. Today, neoliberal globalization has shifted the terrain of struggle further by the fact of corporate dominance over the whole of the peasantry. The massive agitation of the Indian agriculturists since the end of 2020 and the alliances that have emerged should be an eye-opener.

Institutional Design, Local Elite Resistance, and Inequality in Access to Land: Evidence from Cotton-Growing Areas of Tajikistan

Abstract Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Tajikistan, like other postcommunist states, embarked on agricultural land reform. The government, assisted by international organizations, implemented laws and created campaigns to break up Soviet-style collective farms and encourage independent farms. After over a decade, 66 percent of farmers in the country, including in cotton-growing areas, continue to work collectively, and 71 percent of arable land is held in collectives. I argue that the decentralized nature of the land redistribution program enabled the managers of former collective farms, re-labeled as “collective peasant farms,” to gain power so that they could use informal practices to resist peasant shareholders’ efforts to actualize their land rights. Theoretically, my argument reconciles competing perspectives about the reasons for limited land redistribution in the context of postsocialist transition. The study’s policy implication is that the government of Tajikistan, and foreign donors, instead of decentralizing the implementation of land reform, should take an active role in physically redistributing land among shareholders.

Juridical Review of Landreform Land Object Redistribution in Bantarsari Village, Cilacap Regency

Land reform is defined as an effective way to achieve successful development because access to land is crucial for socio-economic development, poverty alleviation, and environmental sustainability. Apart from being a factor of production, the land is also a factor of wealth and prestige. And strength or power. Bantasari Village, Bantarsari Sub-District, Cilacap District is one of the villages that conducts land object redistribution activities in land distribution and land certificates issuance. The redistribution of land objects has not been optimal, and this is because there are still many residents who do not have land certificates as proof of ownership. This research discusses how the juridical review and constraints in implementing land reform land objects' redistribution in Bantasari Village, Bantarsari Sub-District, Cilacap District based on Presidential Regulation No. 86/2018. The method used in this study is the normative juridical method used. It came out through literature studies examining secondary data. The implementation of Agrarian Reform referred to in Article 5 paragraph (1) Presidential Regulation Number 86 of 2018 concerning Agrarian Reform including those carried out through the stages of wealth management referred to in Article 5 paragraph (1) letter a consists of land redistribution or asset legalization.Keywords: Land Redistribution, Land reform, certificate

Between occupation, exile and unification: sequestered and ‘abandoned’ properties in Serbia and Yugoslavia during and after the First World War

ABSTRACT This article examines Serbia’s policies regarding the treatment of enemy subjects, and, in particular, enemy property during and after the Great War. It situates these policies in the context of the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, when tens of thousands of Muslims are estimated to have fled the Macedonia and Kosovo regions, leaving behind their property and belongings. After the subsequent world war, the newly created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes struggled for international recognition, internal legal harmonization and the naturalization of former enemy subjects. These struggles often manifested themselves in Serbian policies towards issues of land redistribution, ownership rights and regional variations, as well as the legal status of the private and public property belonging to the former Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. These questions lingered right up until the late 1930s, when the Yugoslav state finally resolved these longstanding disputes with the successor states – Austria, Bulgaria and Turkey.

A typology of emerging farmers in three rural provinces of South Africa: what are the implications for the land redistribution policy?

PurposeUnderstanding diversity amongst potential beneficiaries of land redistribution is of critical importance for both design and planning of successful land reform interventions. This study seeks to add to the existing literature on farming types, with specific emphasis on understanding diversity within a sub-group of commercially oriented or emerging smallholders.Design/methodology/approachUsing a multivariate statistical analysis – principal component and cluster analyses applied to a sample of 442 commercially-oriented smallholders – five distinct clusters of emerging farmers are identified, using variables related to farmers' characteristics, income and expenditure and farm production indicators and willingness to participate in land redistribution. The five clusters are discussed in light of a predefined selection criteria that is based on the current policies and scholarly thinking.FindingsThe results suggest that there are distinct differences in farming types, and each identified cluster of farmers requires tailored support for the effective implementation of land reform. The identified homogenous sub-groups of smallholders, allows us to understand which farmers could be a better target for a successful land redistribution policy.Originality/valueMost of the existing typology studies in South Africa tend to focus on general smallholders and in the Eastern Cape province; this study extends the literature by focussing on specific prime beneficiaries of land reform in three provinces. This study uses a more detailed dataset than the Statistics general and agricultural household surveys.

The Wealth of Knowledge: Land-Grab Universities in a British Imperial and Global Context

The Wealth of Knowledge:Land-Grab Universities in a British Imperial and Global Context Caitlin P. A. Harvey (bio) the colonial legacy of the American land-grant university traced by the Land-Grab Universities (LGU) project, of public universities "built not just on Indigenous land, but with Indigenous land," reveals a far-reaching pattern of institutional development that relied on the leasing and selling of enormous tracts of expropriated Indigenous lands to raise universities' endowment capital.1 The mechanism effecting this tremendous land redistribution was the Morrill Act (1862). Yet while it was the largest, the Morrill Act was not the only legislative grant of Indigenous land made to fund higher education in the United States or among settler societies worldwide. Contextualizing the LGU findings within the larger history of land-grant universities in British settlement societies makes clear that the American land-grant phenomenon was just one episode in the expanding territoriality of settler-colonial universities. Particularly in Canada and New Zealand but also in Australia and South Africa, fledgling public universities received substantial blocks of unceded Indigenous territory as financing from their governments. The development of America's educational institutions, therefore, did not unfold in isolation from the trends established in other Anglo-dominant settler societies. When we consider the land-grant university in British imperial and global perspective, the full territoriality of land-grant universities comprises over 15 million acres spread over three continents (table 1). Settlers' provincial and federal governments sponsored land-grant institutions with the aim of applying scientific methods to agriculture, fostering technological innovation, and creating an internationally competitive yet civic-minded workforce.2 In New Zealand (Aotearoa) in 1869, for instance, the Province of Otago's legislators issued deeds of 100,000 acres for the University of Otago, followed by another 100,000 acres on the South Island (Te Waipounamu) in the 1870s.3 The Ngāi Tahu disputed this reallocation. But with the New Zealand Wars ongoing and swayed by the complaints of Otago University's largest land lessee, Robert Campbell, the colonial state evicted the Māori landholders.4 [End Page 97] Click for larger view View full resolution Table 1. Aggregate Totals of University Land by Grant and Location In England, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge had long relied on the rental income generated by landholding. Even today, the Oxbridge colleges "are among the largest institutional landowners" in land-scarce England.5 Settler societies carried on this European custom on a larger and more devastating scale. Particularly where capital was lacking from benefactions, fees, or government subsidies, the resort to land-granting was continuous. As early as 1619, the British government assigned 10,000 acres to a "Henrico College" in Virginia. Warfare with the Powhatan Confederacy and chronic underpopulation ensured that this institution was short-lived.6 Reaching forward to the nineteenth century and prior to the Morrill Act, The Constitutional History of New York indicates that in 1846 the U.S. [End Page 98] government released to "Tennessee 1,300,000 acres of public land in that state for the endowment of a college."7 This land, nearly the size of Delaware, lay to the "south and west of the Congressional reservation line." Supposedly "vacant and unappropriated Lands" existed there after the violent removal of the Cherokee.8 In nearly the same moment, one of the earliest educational land grants in British North America went to King's College, a precursor to the University of Toronto, in 1828. An Anglican bishop, John Strachan, secured 225,944 acres of valuable Crown Reserves for the new college.9 It is likely that much of this property once supported the Mississaugas of New Credit (Mississauga Ojibwa). Under the strain of recurring Indigenous-settler skirmishes, the Mississaugas ceded 250,808 acres of their land—covering most of what is now the city of Toronto and region of York—first to the British Crown in 1787 and then to the Upper Canadian government in 1805. The Toronto Purchase, as these agreements became known, followed the influx of Loyalists into Upper Canada after the American Revolutionary War.10 Following Canadian Confederation in 1867, institutions of higher learning repeated Toronto's (and, by then, also...

Effects of the current land tenure on augmenting household farmland access in South East Ethiopia

According to the current land policy of Ethiopia, rural households are legally allowed to access agricultural lands. Nonetheless, the difficulty of rural population in accessing farmlands makes controversial authenticity of this land tenure to solve problems of household farmland access. This study aimed at assessing the effects of the current land tenure on augmenting household farmland access in Ethiopia. The study followed a mixed-methods research design to investigate the variables in the study. Thus, data were collected through a survey questionnaire, focus group discussion and interviews between May and June 2019. For data analysis, both descriptive and inferential statistics methods were employed. Consequently, study results indicated that the mean farmland size per household was 1.59 ha and government land allocation accounted for 41.9%. The farmland accesses of households headed by persons below 35 years were 13% and that of all female-headed households was 23.2%. It also showed that there were illegal farmland accesses via furtive farmland purchasing. On top of this, 63% of respondents perceived that the current land tenure was not a good rule. The regression analysis showed that the number of oxen, total crop production; annual income, education, and credit access were determinants of household farmland size. In conclusion, farmland scare areas in Ethiopia like Arsi zone have problems of deficient government land allocation, as well as unforeseen illicit farmland transactions. Given augmenting household farmland access, the study recommended that female-headed households have to be empowered and younger-headed households should be encouraged to enhancing their farmland accesses. The farming community should affirm to legal land regulations for maintaining their tenure arrangements. The local government should work according to land rules to liquidate illicit land markets. The national government should mitigate imbalanced farmland access by enforcing land rule acts such as land redistribution and reallocation with the consultation of the people. All level governments should strictly control alarming illegal changes of farmlands to urban areas by illicit land transactions.

Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico by Mikael Wolfe

Reviewed by: Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico by Mikael Wolfe Jacob Blanc Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico. By Mikael Wolfe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017, p. 336. $26.95. Mikael Wolfe has provided an entirely original framework for understanding the largest and most emblematic achievement of the Mexican Revolution: the massive redistribution of land. As Wolfe argues in Watering the Revolution, the dismantling of landed estates into communally held ejidos was only half the battle. The second, more complex task was to actually make, and to keep, the land productive. In practice, this meant water. Over the course of the twentieth century, the response to this challenge materialized as an evolving series of efforts to modernize the control and dispersal of water. Focusing on the Laguna region that straddles the states of Durango and Coahuila in north-central Mexico, Wolfe deftly shows how the redistribution of land (reparto de tierra) was inextricably linked to—and in the end, undermined by—the redistribution of water (reparto de agua). Tracing the continuity of technocratic attempts at water management across numerous political contexts—from the Cárdenas-era agrarian reforms of the 1930s, through the so-called Green Revolution of the 1940s and 1950s, and the neoliberalizing policies of the 1980s and beyond—Wolfe argues that the incompatibility between the reparto de tierra and the reparto de agua weakened the viability of agrarian reform and, in a larger sense, doomed Mexico to a seemingly endless cycle of ecological crisis. To be sure, Wolfe acknowledges the long-standing natural components of these issues, as regions like the Laguna had confronted drought and inconsistent river flows for generations. What changed after the Mexican Revolution was not necessarily the root causes of environmental crisis, but rather how state attempts to alleviate the crisis—and in turn, fulfill the legacy of the Revolution—served to only make matters worse. Concrete-lined canals, motorized groundwater pumps, and most controversially, high dams became the avenues through which short-term planning overrode long-term sustainability. The unequal redistribution of water exacerbated social inequality in the countryside by establishing what Wolfe calls "water haves" and "water have-nots." Whereas in theory the redistribution of land chipped away at the traditional power of the latifundio land-holding elite, Wolfe shows that disparate access to water created a new dominant class: the acuifundio. And while it might be tempting to assume that the water have-nots (ejidatarios for the most part) were staunchly anti-technology or anti-modernization, Wolfe's well-researched book shows that for many local communities, projects like the Nazas River dam represented a logical next step toward fulfilling the promise of the Mexican Revolution. Yet these liquid fruits of the Revolution were accessible only to a select few – namely, [End Page 575] the businessmen, politicians, and engineers who benefitted from the acuifundio. Seen together, these perspectives shed important new light on the limitations and contradictions of post-revolutionary Mexico. As a case study on the short-sightedness of natural resource management, Wolfe greatly advances an emerging body of scholarship – such as Eve Buckley's work on Brazil – on the envirotechnical history of Latin America. Watering the Revolution is a must-read for Mexicanists, for environmental historians of Latin America more broadly, and for political ecologists. While Wolfe's primary contribution—foregrounding the history of water in a scholarly field that has focused almost exclusively on land—is strongly stated and developed, his sources and methods are less clear. Gestures to archives and document bases in Mexico and the United States are sprinkled throughout the book, yet the precise methodology remains opaque. Given the extraordinary amount of data compiled (economic, ecological, and agricultural, among others), the lack of a roadmap for sources is a bit disorienting. Notwithstanding this structural concern, Wolfe has given us an innovative and highly engaging study that will be of interest for generations to come, in no small measure because his cautionary tale of ecological mismanagement will likely only become more relevant as time goes on. [End Page 576] Jacob Blanc School of History, Classics, and Archaeology, University of...

The Persistence of Rural Underdevelopment: Evidence from Land Reform in Italy

Patchiness in rural development remains a salient feature of many developed and developing countries that have struggled historically to overcome enormous national disparities in economic structure and well-being. This paper examines how one major, explicit rural policy ostensibly aimed at rural advancement – land reform – can impact uneven development in the countryside. It does so in Italy, where a major land reform redistributed large landholdings to individual peasant families after World War II. Based on original fine-grained data on land redistribution and a geographical regression discontinuity analysis that takes advantage of Italy’s zonal approach to land reform, I find that greater land reform fueled underdevelopment and precarity locally over the long term. Several related mechanisms delayed development in land reform zones: a slower transition out of agriculture, lower labor mobility, and an ageing demographic. These are generalizable mechanisms that could operate in other cases of land reform aside from Italy.

Reconceptualising redistribution of land in South Africa: A possible legal framework

After 27 years the unequal distribution of land in South Africa remains prevalent, despite a constitutional mandate, and corresponding legislative measures and policy documents. In light of the government’s dismal track record in achieving any meaning ful redistribution, this article suggests a possible overarching legal framework within which land redistribution in South Africa could be approached and, ultimately, monitored and adjusted as needed. This requires, from the outset, a contextualisation of relevant concepts of ‘access to land’ and ‘redistribution’ respectively. Thereafter, the article proposes seven different phases, comprising a coherent and broad legal framework for land redistribution. Where relevant, we consider recent developments, including the 2020 Beneficiary Policy and the 2019 Land Reform Report. While all land, urban as well as rural, is integral in the redistribution endeavour, the article’s main emphasis is on agricultural land: reference is made to urban and peri-urban land only where appropriate. The article concludes with an Annexure that contains a schematic overview of the suggested different phases, and the corresponding institutions we propose ought to be responsible for, or involved in administering, the respective phases.

Революция и контрреволюция в станице Черлаковской. 1918–1928 гг.

The history of the Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War in Russia continues to attract the interest of modern historians and sociologists. The socio-economic transformations of the end of the XX century and the development of the methodology of history led to an increase in the relevance of questions about land use and land ownership, the emergence of new assessments and approaches to solving them. The aim of the study is to determine the causes and level of participation of the Cossacks and other groups of the population of the village Celakovsky in the events of the Revolution and the Civil War, as well as the participation of the сossacks in the solution of the agrarian question in the territories controlled by the сossacks. Using archival materials, memoirs of contemporaries and local history studies, the author comes to the conclusion that the front-line cossacks, who did not want to continue the war and supported the Soviet government in the fall of 1917, mostly sabotaged its agrarian transformations on the ground. By the summer of 1918 The cossack’s population of the village opposed the redistribution of the cossack lands on the basis of the decree on socialization, and supported the overthrow of the Soviet government. Further agrarian transformations became possible only after the victory of the bolsheviks in the Civil War

Socio-economic problems of agriculture of the Republic of Khakassia during the reform

The article shows that the socio-economic conditions in the agriculture of the Republic of Khakassia, located in the south of Central Siberia, is undergoing significant changes for 25–28 years after the transition from public to private property. Land use, agricultural products, population size and migration are considered at different periods of reform. During the transition from public ownership to private ownership, a substantial redistribution of arable land occurred.