Thesis (M.A. (Political Science))--University of Limpopo, 2007 / Since 1913 black South Africans have been forcefully dispossessed of land under the racist land laws of the successive white South African governments. In 1994 the black government began to pass land laws that were supposed to provide blacks with land ownership rights. Ten years later blacks have re-claimed less than four percent of the eighty seven percent of the land they were dispossessed of. The failure to return dispossessed land to blacks is attributed to the ideology of the current government with respect to its land policy. This study attempts to fill the void regarding the ideological implications of the land reform policy of the post-apartheid government. We speculate that neo-liberal implications are dominant within this policy. Social democracy can overcome the failure of the policy as it is cost-effective and efficient and attempts to achieve social justice. It can therefore afford dispossessed and landless blacks land ownership.

This thesis is concerned with evaluating the principles of, and approaches to, contemporary land redistribution programmes. Using contemporary South African land redistribution policy as a case study, it examines the policy process of a land reform programme. This enables an assessment of the extent to which policy implementation difficulties that are often experienced are the result of flawed policy conceptualisation and/or policy development, rather than simply poor policy implementation. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in South Africa between 1998 and 2001, the thesis provides the first full account of the policy process for contemporary South African land redistribution policy. This account identifies many of the broader political and contextual factors that help explain why and how the policy process evolved as it did, and adds to previous academic research on the extent to which competing political agendas affected the policy process. The main argument of the thesis is that the policy process for conceptualising, developing and implementing land redistribution policy between 1994 and 2001 was flawed. The thesis contrasts theoretical models of a policy process with models of the actual policy processes observed in South Africa during this period, in order to identify how and why the policy process was flawed. It proposes that the policy process was influenced primarily by competing political agendas that weakened and hindered the policy conceptualisation and policy development stages of the process, resulting in a land redistribution policy that was both difficult to implement and unable to meet the challenge of rural poverty it was meant to help alleviate.