GSSC Seminar Series
17 June 2025
Neither statutory nor customary: Land tenure transitions and emerging relations of land control in South Africa
Ruth Hall (University of the Western Cape, South Africa)
12:00-13:00
Four land tenure transitions are underway in South Africa, reflecting contradictory policy ambitions and social processes beyond the domain of state governance. As in several other countries, land tenures are undergoing profound changes that are being driven both ‘from above’ by governments and development agencies, and ‘from below’ through societal, demographic, economic and ecological change. While land grabs and privatisation of customary and community land continue apace across much of the continent, as or more significant are incremental processes of commodification and individualisation. Customary land is thus undergoing tenure transitions which may have compounding effects. Simultaneously, in the South African case, land reform involving redistribution of privately-owned farmland has seen the creation of community ownership models. This too, has been accompanied by processes of informalisation and new unplanned tenures emerging outside of formal governance systems. This opens up questions about informal tenures that emerge from below, amidst failed development plans. The analysis raises questions as to whether or in what ways these sites and social relations constitute spaces of exclusion and marginality, or emancipatory spaces.
Ruth Hall obtained her DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford, for her research on the politics of land redistribution in post-apartheid South Africa. A Rhodes Scholar, she has received a Distinguished Researcher Award in 2017 and served on the Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture in South Africa in 2018-19. She is currently Acting Director of the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, where she is currently Acting Director. She holds the South African Research Chair in Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, which is funded by the Department of Science and Innovation and the National Research Foundation.