“This paper focuses only on tenure reform and its aims to secure the land rights of:
farm workers and farm dwellers living on privately-owned land, and residents of the former ‘reserves’ or Bantustans, now known as communal areas. Summarising the trajectory of tenure policy and law making from 1994 through to the present, the paper shows how discourses of rights, citizenship and democracy shape policies and legislation. We assess the policies and outcomes, and argue that the degree to which legally defined rights to land have been realised in practice depends in large part on the outcome of local-level struggles within shifting relations of power. Local arenas are not, however, hermetically sealed off from wider power relations, discourses and institutional contexts (including those of law and policy) which mediate the operation of power. This means that the impacts of land rights defined in law can be direct and indirect, material and symbolic. Inadequate state capacity for implementing law and policy, and the nature of structural poverty in rural South Africa constrain the direct impact of law and policy.”
