EDIAIS :Conference papers

Julian Quan, Natural Resources Institute, University of Greenwich and Edward Lahiff, Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) University of Western Cape, South Africa

Assessing The Impact Of Major Land Reforms On Livelihood Opportunities For The Poor

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ABSTRACT

A major historical weakness of redistributive land reforms has been their frequent failure to create conditions for sustainable farm and other enterprises managed by land reform communities, as a result of problems of integration with wider local social, economic and environmental planning. However the methods of impact assessment currently applied to land reforms by governments and development agencies have not been designed to enable improvements in land reform policies and planning.

In seeking to evaluate and assess programmes impacts, governments and development agencies have generally applied quantitative, statistical methods in order to assess the rate and costs of land transfers, and measure changes in incomes, or welfare of beneficiaries. These approaches, however, neglect two critical dimensions:

the perspectives of land reform beneficiaries themselves, and those of the civil society organisations involved in advocating for and delivering land reforms; and
The need to assess the linkage and follow up of land access programmes with programmes to deliver basic infrastructure, services, plus technical and marketing support.

This paper examines and critically assesses the methods applied to assess impacts of land reform programmes in South Africa and Brazil by the respective governments, and the findings recent studies have delivered. It contrasts these with the approaches deployed by independent civil society evaluations of the same programmes, and explores how participatory approaches to land reform impact assessment might be further developed, involving beneficiaries themselves, land reform movements, rural unions, NGOs and other local actors. The paper concludes by considering how participatory approaches to impact assessment might be integrated into more formal governmental systems for monitoring and evaluation of land reforms, and the benefits that this can bring in terms of sustainable social and economic impact at local level, together with stronger social accountability and control.

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