Thesis (M.A.)--Bowling Green State University, 2005. / Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 131 p. Includes bibliographical references.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in 50% fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Management (in the field of Public Policy). February 2017 / The government of Zimbabwe embarked on a land redistribution programme at the turn of the twentieth century. The programme has been mired in controversy which has culminated in polarisation. The major objective of the land redistribution was to redress historical imbalances and to increase food security by increasing access to fertile and arable land to indigenous people. Due to lack of policy clarity and consensus, the programme has so far been a huge failure. This study sought to interrogate the policy implementation and how this had impacted on productivity on the A1 model of farming in Zimbabwe. Results showed that the programme was adversely affected by lack of political will and lack of policy clarity while it was clogged with political interference. The government had failed to provide sustainable funding to enhance productivity. This had led to despondency among civil servants and beneficiaries of the land reform programme. There is ineffective implementation of policy due to factors such as lack of experienced personnel and unavailability of funding. Polarisation has seen other key stakeholders shunning this programme. Under the prevailing socio-political environment, this programme is set to be an outright failure to enhance food security sustainability. The study unpacked valuable impediments which inevitably, were drivers of poor attainment of the objectives of model A1 farming in Zimbabwe. / MT 2017

<p>Land ownership, control and reform have been some of the most contentious issues in contemporary Zimbabwe. The land question has generated a lot of emotional debate and there is a general consensus that it represents a critical dimension to the crisis the country is going through. This thesis intended to offer some insights into the modus operandi and outcomes of land reform in the country.</p>

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirement of the degree of Master of Arts in Sociology (Coursework and Research) JOHANNESBURG / The advent of the Fast Track Land Reform Programme influenced a major shift of small scale farmers from subsistence cereal cropping to the commercial growing of tobacco. Smallholder tobacco farmers enjoyed economic prosperity in the tobacco farming sector but that prosperity was short lived. Smallholder farmers face a lot of marketing, production and policy problems within the tobacco farming industry and these problems are increasingly rendering them unproductive. Most smallholder tobacco farmers are entrapped in a ‘vulnerability context’ in which they are exposed to food and income insecurity owing to the problems which they face. However, despite the challenges which they face, smallholder tobacco farmers are largely resilient; they formulate and reformulate their livelihoods on a daily basis in endeavours to cushion themselves against the overwhelming odds. It was against this background that this qualitative study sought to explore the adaptive strategies that are pursued by smallholder tobacco farmers in response to the effects posed by tobacco mono-cropping. This study also sought to examine the factors that influenced the choice of the adaptive strategies that were pursued by those farmers as well as the factors that constrained their adaptive capacity. To meet the aims of this study, a purely qualitative methodology was adopted in which unstructured interviews and focus group discussions with smallholder farmers who were purposively selected were conducted in Hurungwe district. The study found out that smallholder tobacco farmers were highly adaptive and agricultural intensification, migration, and micro-enterprise activities were found out to be the main activities that were pursued by those farmers. The study also found out gender, income levels, educational levels, infrastructure and equipment ownership as the main factors that either determined or constrained the adaptive capacity of those farmers. Based on key findings, the researcher recommended the government and non-governmental organisations to enhance rural people’s education and credit facilities access, ensure infrastructural development in rural areas and encourage peer to peer sharing of vocational skills. / MT2017

Crises of food production, poverty and deepening inequality are common problems around the world and constitute the distinctive features of the global social landscape including the poorer regions. In the poorer regions and in Southern Africa particularly, land is a key asset in sustaining livelihoods. Ironically, the majority of the people in these poorer regions are landless. The land resource is however of crucial importance to the economies of the Southern African region contributing a major share of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and employment. Colonial land policies institutionalised racial inequality with regard to land in southern Africa. Recent attempts to confront the consequences of historical land expropriation and to redress contemporary land-based inequities, discriminatory legislation and institutions have generated renewed racial conflict in the sub region and created a life of insecurity on the continent, particularly in the southern African region. The objective of human security is to achieve safety from chronic threats such as hunger, disease etc, and secure protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of daily lives. Land policies are of paramount importance in pursuit of human security. Access to land in this regard determines who lives or dies. The study explores post independence and post apartheid land policies in southern Africa using South Africa and Zimbabwe as case studies. It interrogates the linkage between land policy and human security; in particular determining how land policies affect human security. Recent activities in both countries - land invasions and economic collapse in Zimbabwe and high rate of unemployment, inequality and poverty in South Africa - attest to the land issue and clearly spell out the need for land reform. The study shows that Africa’s disadvantaged position (in power and wealth terms) in the international system has made it difficult for African states to address local or national preferences on the issue of land access. Major donor countries and international finance institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF have tended to prevail on African governments to adopt market liberalization mechanisms in tackling the land question. The argument behind this is that land should be given to those who can work it the most and productively while the returns can be distributed to all. As such, the market should be left to determine who has access to land. But the market oriented economic policies which African governments are often forced to adopt through structural adjustment programmes are essentially designed to strengthen multi-national corporations and to integrate elites in the southern African region into the international capitalist system. The reward-and-punishment system facilitated by the free market economy may benefit the local elite but it alienates the poor and undermines human security. Human dignity, food security and poverty reduction demand development agencies, governments and other organisations responsibly devise policies and strategies that will enable assets building and promote self-reliance of poor people and communities. Human security comprising food security, environmental security of individuals, and social and political security among others is critically affected by access to land.

<p>Land ownership, control and reform have been some of the most contentious issues in contemporary Zimbabwe. The land question has generated a lot of emotional debate and there is a general consensus that it represents a critical dimension to the crisis the country is going through. This thesis intended to offer some insights into the modus operandi and outcomes of land reform in the country.</p>

The thesis offers an original sociological understanding of intermediary Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in the modern world. This is pursued through a study of NGOs and land reform in contemporary Zimbabwe. The prevailing literature on NGOs is marked by a sociological behaviourism that analyses NGOs in terms of external relations and the object-subject dualism. This behaviourism has both ‘structuralist’ and ‘empiricist’ trends that lead to instrumentalist and functionalist forms of argumentation. The thesis details an alternative conceptual corpus that draws upon the epistemological and theoretical insights of Marx and Weber. The epistemological reasoning of Marx involves processes of deconstruction and reconstruction. This entails conceptualizing NGOs as social forms that embody contradictory relations and, for analytical purposes, the thesis privileges the contradiction between ‘the global’ and ‘the local’. In this regard, it speaks about processes of ‘glocalization’ and ‘glocal modernities’ in which NGOs become immersed. The social field of NGOs is marked by ambiguities and tensions, and NGOs seek to ‘negotiate’ and manoeuvre their way through this field by a variety of organizational practices. Understanding these practices necessitates studying NGOs ‘from within’ and drawing specifically on Weber’s notion of ‘meaning’. These practices often entail activities that stabilize and simplify the world and work of NGOs, and this involves NGOs in prioritizing their own organizational sustainability. In handling the tension between ‘the global’ and ‘the local’, NGOs also tend to privilege global trajectories over local initiatives. The thesis illustrates these points in relation to the work of intermediary NGOs in Zimbabwe over the past ten years. Since the year 2000, a radical restructuring of agrarian relations has occurred, and this has been based upon the massive redistribution of land. In this respect, local empowering initiatives have dramatically asserted themselves against globalizing trajectories. These changes have posed serious challenges to ‘land’ NGOs, that is, NGOs involved in land reform either as advocates for reform or as rural development NGOs. The thesis shows how a range of diverse ‘land’ NGOs has ‘handled’ the heightened contradictions in their social field in ways that maintain their organizational coherence and integrity.

Magister Economicae - MEcon / Land ownership, control and reform have been some of the most contentious issues in contemporary Zimbabwe. The land question has generated a lot of emotional debate and there is a general consensus that it represents a critical dimension to the crisis the country is going through. This thesis intended to offer some insights into the modus operandi and outcomes of land reform in the country. / South Africa

Thesis (M. A. ( Sociology)) -- University of Limpopo, 2014. / Land reform is one of the heavily contested issues the world over as reflected in the literature discussion. It is an indisputable fact that land is crucial for human survival across cultures, races, gender, and beliefs. The aim of the study was to investigate the impact of land reform on poverty alleviation in Zimbabwe, Mwenezi district in Chikomati and Dungwe villages. The problem which was under investigation was, ‘why is poverty seemed not to be alleviated/reduced despite the era of land reform?’ The impact of land reform on poverty alleviation was pointed out. The respondents were selected through snowballing (one potential respondent leads to the other respondent) and the data was collected through focus group discussions. The analysis was done through thematic analysis. The research found out that land reform alone cannot alleviate the expected fraction of poverty in any country in general and Zimbabwe in particular. There is need for all sectors of the economy to join hands in order to alleviate poverty, for example, education, health, agriculture, finance, and many more. Swathes of land alone had proved that it is not enough to reduce poverty unless underpinned with other sectors. Rapid reforms are needed in social, economic, and political spheres in order for land reform programme to deliver positive results to the beneficiaries and the whole economy at large. Facts on the ground in Zimbabwe are that mere distribution of land cannot on its own alleviate poverty, but the fact remains that land reform is an irreplaceable arrow in poverty reduction.

This thesis explores social policy outcomes of the FTLRP. The thesis comes from an appreciation that there has been a lot of attention that has been given to the process and outcomes of the FTLRP. Various and sometimes antagonistic analytical frameworks have been employed by different scholars who come from different epistemological standings resulting in academic polarity on the subject of the FTLRP in Zimbabwe. This thesis transcends all the analytical frameworks to provide a unique perspective of the extent to which the FTLRP achieved social policy outcomes. Some of the scholars who have written on this subject have grappled with some of the social policy outcomes without however a deliberate focus on social policy outcomes. The main contribution of this thesis to the body of knowledge is its exploration of the extent to which the FTLRP has been a social policy tool that has achieved social policy outcomes. This is important because for a long time land reform has not been generally considered as a social policy tool in the main stream social policy literature. The reason for this is that social policy literature has been dominated by OECD scholars who naturally focused more on social policy tools that are more relevant to their contexts. In the process they have sought to transpose the tools that are more prevalent in their contexts to Africa. Consequently, social policy tools from the global south, such as land reform, have not featured in any significant way in mainstream social policy literature. The thesis used the transformative social policy framework in both the research and analysis of the data. The conceptual framework identifies five functions of social policy namely redistribution, production, protection, reproduction and social cohesion. Using a mixed methods approach, the thesis interrogated the extent to which the five functions of social policy were realised by the FTLRP. Research findings have shown that the major outcome that was unequivocally realised was redistribution. This is so because the country’s agrarian structure dramatically changed from a bi-modal set up where 6000 white farmers owned more than 35 percent of the arable land to a new structure where about 180 000 households of diverse backgrounds, inter alia former farm workers, people from communal areas, civil servants, war veterans, pensioners, government senior civil servants and the unemployed, now work and live on the same land. The other four social policy functions were achieved to varying degrees. Lastly, the research looked at the human development outcomes of the FTLRP by focusing on the state of education in the resettled areas. The research observed that the FTLRP increased both primary (13%) and secondary (31%) education accessibility for the children of land beneficiaries. Due to the abrupt nature with which education services were on demand, the quality was compromised. / Development Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (Development Studies)