Policy options for land reform in South Africa: New institutional mechanisms?

Since the 2005 Land Summit, new approaches to land reform have been on the agenda, yet there remains little clarity on the way forward. The main focus has been on means of accelerating the redistribution of land through new modes of acquiring land. Acquisition is an important matter but if treated in isolation risks mis-specifying the core problems evident in land reform in South Africa. A new phase of land reform located within a wider agrarian reform is needed and will require new institutional arrangements. Any alternative strategy will have to revise the institutional mechanisms that have been handling land reform thus far. Are the procedures and the institutions that are in place to design and implement land reform adequate and appropriate to the kind of new tasks envisaged? What new farming units and activities are intended, and what post-transfer support will be required to make this agricultural system productive? This paper explores mechanisms appropriate to one kind of agricultural alternative: a vision of a productive, small-scale essentially household farm sector.Interchurch Organisation for Development Cooperation (ICCO

A comparative political economy of regional migration and labour mobility in West and Southern Africa

Based on a collaboration with the late Lionel Cliffe, this article suggests agendas and methods for analysing regional patterns of migration and labour mobility in Southern and West Africa. It locates local communities in regional patterns and global processes using two key organising concepts: first, the regionalisation of Africa, as outlined in Samir Amin's work. We consider continuities and discontinuities with the paradigms of ‘Africa of the labour reserves’ and ‘Africa of the colonial trade economy’ to understand contemporary realities. Second, this article explores the mechanisms and characteristics of cheap labour on different scales of analysis. This includes a discussion of the theories that explored the relations of reproduction of labour, and the reproduction of the labour system as a whole. In doing so, it rethinks the modes of production discourse to highlight the continuing importance of situations where capitalism exists alongside non-capitalist relations of production and reproduction

Western Economic Involvement in Portugal and the Colonies in the 1970s

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