Dr.

Rick

de Satge

The Cape Winelands District Municipality has identified land reform as one of the key factors that can address empowerment and poverty eradication in its municipal area. Its role and the availability of resources for land reform in the District are not
clear and it is seeking the support of an agency to achieve the following objectives:

The key focus of this document is the settlement of the Ebenhaeser restitution claim in the Western Cape. This is guided by the Settlement Framework Agreement which was signed by the Community, the then Department of Land Affairs and the Commission on the Restitution of Land Rights in March 2005. 

The CDLAP has three main components:

A presentation focusing on facts about land and land dispossession in South Africa

This article explores the impacts of the now discontinued Land Reform for Agricultural Development Programme on household consumption but argues that more work needs to be done to fully understand the connection between asset treansfer programmes and a reduction in persistent poverty

Land reform in South Africa intends to redress racial imbalances with regard to ownership and access to land. On the surface, the various strategy documents also talk to transferring land to black women, the youth and the disabled. This article examines interesting patterns that are emerging with respect to gender relations and land ownership driven by land reform including mounting evidence of exclusive female ownership and co-ownership of land among land reform recipient households.

Customary Law has been a subordinate element in the South African legal order in that it was subject to state legislation, certain Courts could not take judicial notice of it, and it could be applied only if compatible with principles of public policy and natural justice. These were the requirements of the so-called “Repugnancy Proviso”. In addition customary law was subordinate to Roman-Dutch common law and the common law provided the model to which customary law was expected to conform. In fact all legal analysis or comments on customary law are mediated by western legal categories.

A common misconception in relation to common property situations is that the choice of the legal form will determine whether communal property institutions function well or not. The reality is that whether good, fair management and land administration takes place or not is often largely determined by issues like the following, which can undermine effective governance and land administration irrespective of which legal entity is used:
• Do the majority of residents understand and agree with how land administration processes work?

This paper argues that the focus in the community based natural resource management (CBNRM) literature on the devolution and decentralisation of state authority and responsibility over natural resources to communities does not pay sufficient attention to the role of the state in creating and maintaining a coherent institutional environment.

This paper is concerned primarily with the functions of land administration. Its
purpose is to describe the current land administration practices as understood by
traditional structures with a view to unpacking some of the components of the existing
African tenure arrangements in KwaZulu-Natal. This, it is hoped, will help to create a
base to understand how communal land systems operate, regardless of which structure
governs them, in order to support practices that secure tenure effectively.

The paper asserts that in order to be effective it is important to work with and from existing tenure systems and to build upon them, rather than expect that they can be “demolished and replaced by efficient new systems”.  Experience both here and elsewhere in Africa also tells us that attempts to change tenure tend to result in a “defaulting” back to what is known, often with increased confusion and conflict over procedures and adjudication authorities.