This thesis examines the livelihood outcomes of Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP). It asks, what has happened to rural livelihoods following land redistribution; how did land occupations and redistribution unfold; who gained land in the A1 resettlement areas; what new patterns of production can be identified and how do these compare between different settlement types and across time; how have smallholders responded to new opportunities and challenges on and off the farm; and what are the experiences of women and former farm workers? The thesis adopts a multi-methods, comparative approach, drawing on survey data from over 500 rural households and in-depth interviews with 132 “new” farmers. The thesis is a comparative assessment of livelihood outcomes in the new resettlement areas vis-à-vis the old resettlement and communal areas. The results of a series of statistical analyses and interviews show that the “new” A1 farmers are mostly poor and landless people from neighbouring communal areas. These resettlement farmers also produce more maize, cotton and tobacco than their counterparts in other rural areas. The main constraint to smallholder development in these areas has been the general lack of inputs (especially fertilisers), credit and markets. Resettlement farmers, old and new, have responded to these challenges by engaging in contract farming and/or a wider range of non-farm income generating activities, earning higher incomes than those in the communal areas. The data also shows that income from farm and non-farm activities is then reinvested in productive assets and agricultural production. The final chapter presents smallholders’ perceptions about their own tenure security. While many feel secure on their new land, land rights for women and former farm workers continue to be mediated through men and settlers, respectively. Their livelihoods thus rest precariously on their abilities to manage these relationships. Thus, in addition to offering a detailed, empirical analysis of the livelihood outcomes of Zimbabwe land reform, the thesis also contributes to wider theoretical debates, challenging narratives of deagrarianisation and emphasising the importance of multi-methods approaches to understanding complex livelihood changes in the context of land reform.

Magister Artium (Development Studies) - MA(DVS) / The international migrant stock has continued to grow at a fast pace increasing from 222 million in 2010 to 244 million in 2015. Reasons for migration are diverse and include conflicts, poverty and natural tragedies. South to South migration is the most prevalent on the African continent; similarly, half of migrants from developing countries, the world over, are estimated to reside in other developing countries. South Africa is amongst the continent’s most popular destinations for Africa’s migrants. Among the international migrants of African descent who reside in South Africa, are Ghanaians; a migrant population rarely considered by migration studies conducted in the country. Ghanaians receive less than 5% of the permits granted by South Africa to migrants every year. Among this lot of migrants, are undocumented Ghanaians who live in the country with little or no social protection. They are exposed to various health and social conditions and resort to survivalist strategies as a coping mechanism. However, very little is known about the specifics of the aforementioned challenges and the strategies they use to cope with these, in South Africa, for studies in this regard are largely non-existent. With the aim of filling this gap, this study explores the economic and social survival strategies of Ghanaian migrants in Johannesburg, South Africa. Using qualitative research methods, it draws data from 10 Key Informant Individual Interviews and three Focus Group Discussions (FGD) and analyses the experiences of documented and undocumented Ghanaian migrants in relation to access to livelihood, health, housing and their use of social networks in South Africa. The findings of this research indicated that economic reason is the main push factor for the migration of Ghanaians to South Africa. It is hoped that the relevant authorities in Ghana and South Africa that are positioned to address the challenges faced by migrants will find the results of this study useful in their efforts to mitigate the plight of documented and undocumented Ghanaian migrants in the informal sector of South Africa.

Student Number : 9510358Y - PhD thesis - School of Social Sciences - Faculty of Humanities

Over the last four decades, farming families throughout North America experienced significant transitions due, in part, to the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. This multi-sited dissertation investigates the ways in which a network of binational (Mexican-American) families organize their small- to mid-scale farming enterprises, engage in global networks as food producers, and contribute to rural economies in the southeastern U.S. and the Mexican Bajío. To mitigate difficult transitions that came with the globalizing of agri-food markets, members of this extended family group created collaborative, kin-based arrangements to produce, distribute, and market fresh-market fruits and vegetables in the foothills of southern Appalachia and basic grains in the foothills of the Mexican Bajío. Members of extended binational families regularly negotiate social, economic, and political borders within and across regions, genders, and generations. This study shows how these binational kin use cooperative practices to navigate two distinct, yet interrelated, contemporary agricultural political economic environments in North America. The study counter-constructs stereotypes of Latinx and their roles in southeastern U.S. agriculture by focusing on a vertically integrated, kin group of allied, migrant farming families and theorizing them as binational collective strategists. Their stories and strategies provide insight into the importance of temporalities and practices of kin relatedness to agri-food enterprises and suggest possibilities for alternative distributions of surplus value within the globalized agri-food system.

Despite the fact that conservation ideology has led conservation practice over the last quarter of a century, the removal of local residents from protected areas in the name of biological preservation remains the most common strategy in developing countries. Its wide-ranging impacts on displaced societies have rarely been properly addressed, particularly in regard to the establishment of parks. This thesis is based on 15 months fieldwork carried out among a group of displaced park residents known as Rana Tharus in the country of Nepal. They have long lived in Royal Shuklaphanta Wildlife Reserve in the far-western part of that nation. This thesis is largely inspired by recent academic advocacy that conservation-induced dislocations on rural communities are having a serious influence on policy implementation. Such advocacy is leading to more effective and pragmatic park policies. West, Igoe and Brockington (2006) point out that park residents are an indispensable part of protected areas and their cultural and economic interactions with parks occur in diverse ways. Without a full understanding of these interrelationships, any kind of forced conservation policies will be doomed to fail and cause severe disturbances to people’s lives. Like most protected areas in developing countries, this thesis shows that the unplanned resettlement scheme of Shulkaphanta failed to mitigate the socio-economic losses that Rana Tharus experienced due to their displacement. The ethnographic data notes that when attention is paid solely to the economic losses experienced by Rana Tharus, the social costs such as social exclusion, loss of culture, and psychological depression are rarely addressed in the dislocation program. An inadequate understanding of the links between protected areas and local livelihoods is one of the major causes for the continuation of park-people conflicts including Shuklaphanta. In this thesis, I demonstrate how the displacement and other social changes have gradually diminished the social and economic livelihoods of the Rana people. I argue that many of these social impacts were unexpected because Rana Tharus actively responded to all these changes by putting new social relations into effect. As a result, significant social transformations have occurred in contemporary Rana Tharu society. The undivided household unit was no longer their first preference when the new economic realities made themselves felt, and gender and patrilineal kin relationships became more tense. The traditional labouring system (Kamaiya) that existed between wealthy and poor Rana Tharus declined due to increasing poverty. All these had erased their ability to maintain sustainable livelihoods that they had previously enjoyed. Moreover, substantial loss of landownership had made it impossible for Rana Tharus to share equal social, economic and political status with the new migrants - the twice-born Pahaaris. These accumulated and unforseen results of conservation practices can only be well understood if a holistic analytical perspective is adopted. This thesis borrows the concept of sustainable household livelihood system and the social theories of practice, power and agency to explore the dynamic relationships between conservation, local livelihoods and culture. The stories told by the Rana Tharu provide some important lessons. I argue that dislocation programs should be put aside or at least closely reviewed if their hidden social impacts are not well understood or at least lead to some form of compensation. Such action may prevent the further expansion of park-people conflicts which are shown to hinder conservation efforts of Shuklaphanta and local sustainable livelihoods. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1369652 / Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, School of Social Sciences, 2009

<p>Recurrent crises of food insecurity and poverty are widespread in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). There is an urgent need to increase food production so as to reduce bad nutrition and alleviate poverty. The availability and management of water contributes crucially to the variation in yields. Since the majority of farmers in SSA practice rain-fed agriculture under adverse climatic conditions, it is crucial to use water-conserving technologies systematically and make rainwater management an integral part of land use and crop management. While rainwater harvesting technologies (RHT) can increase productivity of rain-fed agriculture significantly at reasonable costs, successful adoption of RHT and accompanying high yields still remain primarily at family level and/or in geographical ‘pockets’. The big question is ‘why have farmers not widely adopted these apparently cheap and beneficial practices?’ An adequate understanding of the factors that lead some farmers to adopt RHT, characteristics of households that use RHT as well as technology transfer approaches offer valuable insights. Based on focus group discussions and a questionnaire survey covering adopters and non-adopters of RHT, and interviews with extension officers conducted in two banana growing districts in Uganda, this paper reveals circumstances, incentives, and support that would facilitate widespread adoption of RHT.</p>

Recurrent crises of food insecurity and poverty are widespread in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). There is an urgent need to increase food production so as to reduce bad nutrition and alleviate poverty. The availability and management of water contributes crucially to the variation in yields. Since the majority of farmers in SSA practice rain-fed agriculture under adverse climatic conditions, it is crucial to use water-conserving technologies systematically and make rainwater management an integral part of land use and crop management. While rainwater harvesting technologies (RHT) can increase productivity of rain-fed agriculture significantly at reasonable costs, successful adoption of RHT and accompanying high yields still remain primarily at family level and/or in geographical ‘pockets’. The big question is ‘why have farmers not widely adopted these apparently cheap and beneficial practices?’ An adequate understanding of the factors that lead some farmers to adopt RHT, characteristics of households that use RHT as well as technology transfer approaches offer valuable insights. Based on focus group discussions and a questionnaire survey covering adopters and non-adopters of RHT, and interviews with extension officers conducted in two banana growing districts in Uganda, this paper reveals circumstances, incentives, and support that would facilitate widespread adoption of RHT.

Coal mining carries significant impacts for surrounding livelihood practices. Yet, in order to explain how specific impacts become grounded within a particular community, attention must be given to the complex assemblage of socio-political and economic forces operating at the local scale. As such, this paper builds upon 3 months of field research in 2010 to describe the impact of decentralized extractive resource governance at coal mines near the rural coastal village of Sekerat, East Kalimantan. Employing evolutions in political ecology research, the analysis focuses on the evolving governance ‘space’ in order to explain how institutional analyses of resource extraction governance and livelihood governance can be integrated to understand how scalar processes construct a range of real and perceived impacts which condition the decision-making modalities of local villagers. A case is then made for giving greater consideration to the importance of temporality and materiality to explaining how land-based and wage-labour livelihood practices have become ‘reified’ within the local village.

This study argues that the sensory order employed during everyday activities deepens our understanding of local people’s relations with the environment. This study was conducted in Larabanga, Ghana, employing anthropology of the senses and phenomenology. The study reveals that people acquire ways of doing things and organizing their lives through their sensory engagement with their environment. Their engagement is further highlighted by the way they make themselves a home in their environment which informs about these sensory orders.

Coal mining carries significant impacts for surrounding livelihood practices. Yet, in order to explain how specific impacts become grounded within a particular community, attention must be given to the complex assemblage of socio-political and economic forces operating at the local scale. As such, this paper builds upon 3 months of field research in 2010 to describe the impact of decentralized extractive resource governance at coal mines near the rural coastal village of Sekerat, East Kalimantan. Employing evolutions in political ecology research, the analysis focuses on the evolving governance ‘space’ in order to explain how institutional analyses of resource extraction governance and livelihood governance can be integrated to understand how scalar processes construct a range of real and perceived impacts which condition the decision-making modalities of local villagers. A case is then made for giving greater consideration to the importance of temporality and materiality to explaining how land-based and wage-labour livelihood practices have become ‘reified’ within the local village.