How does land reform occur and under what conditions do land transfers take place? While many scholars have studied demand-driven explanations of land reform, I argue that to understand contemporary market-driven land reform outcomes, one must also examine the supply side incentives on the part of existing landholders. Interviews and descriptive geospatial data from two provinces in South Africa show that landholders made land reform work for them and in doing so the redistribution of land reinforced past types of segregation. Their strategies were shaped by place-specific histories of segregation: white farmers in spatially segregated rural spaces used land redistribution to buffer their farms against predominately Black settlements, while white farmers in rural areas with higher economic segregation incorporated Black farmers into the commercial value chain via land redistribution. My findings have implications for studies of redistribution in highly unequal contexts: market-based redistribution can reinforce historical spatial or economic segregation.
About the speaker:
Alex Dyzenhaus is a Democracy and Development Research Fellow with the OSUN University Network at the Mandela School of Public Governance at UCT. His book project – “A Grain of Maize” – focuses on land redistribution and restitution in post-apartheid South Africa. In it, he shows that questions of supply determine when and where land redistribution occurs, related to both rural segregation and variation within a sector’s agricultural institutions. Alex received his PhD in Government from Cornell University in 2022