Land Reform and Post-Settlement Support in South Africa

I worked in land reform in South Africa over an extended period, starting out in a land rights NGO in the 90s. Hired to make the links between rural development and land reform, I also advocated for sustainability centring on trying to integrate environmental planning guidelines into Restitution, Redistribution and Tenure Reform. This was later transformed into developing guidelines for better planning of post-settlement support in land reform projects. One of the tools developed was an Environmental Sustainability Assessment

Tool for assessing the potential impacts of land use and development and how to mitigate them. I then managed the development of a 10 year strategy for settlement and implementation support for land and agrarian reform in South Africa. My last work in the mid 2000s was doing a Mid-Term Review of the Participatory Settlement and Development Support to Land Reform Beneficiaries Project, which was an important piece of work for me, giving me the opportunity to reflect on the work I had done since I began advocating sustainability in rights-based land reform in SA. The findings, twenty years later, show that it is still a long and complex struggle.