Browsing by Author "Hart, Timothy George Balne"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Brokering, mediating and translating rural development: land and agricultural reform in the southern Cape
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-12) Hart, Timothy George Balne; van der Waal, Kees; Robins, Steven Lance; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Sociology and Social Anthropology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The anthropology of development has begun to focus on the analytical concept of brokers as crucial actors, and to investigate their presence across the ‘development chain’. Development does not simply work through technical processes but through complex social processes of brokerage or mediation, invoking processes of assemblage, translation and representation of realities. This dissertation examines the agency of brokers and mediators to understand how development unfolds and is shaped hrough acts of mediation. It challenges the concept of brokers for being too broad, and not accounting for less influential actors who also mediate and perform broker-like roles and activities. Since 1994 rural development interventions in South Africa have mostly been marked by the redistribution of large-scale commercial farmland. The assumption has been that commercial agriculture is the economic mainstay of rural areas and that land seekers want land to farm in order to improve livelihoods and social circumstances. Yet, many of the resulting projects have been economically unsuccessful due to misguided policy, bureaucratic inefficiency, bad planning and insufficient support. The generally accepted consensus amongst policymakers is that success simply requires the improvement in current state policy and agency practices. This over simplification ignores the actors identified as brokers and their agency of mediation in influencing outcomes. This dissertation explores the role and agency of brokers in rural development by examining the redistribution of farmland to a number of households in the village of Waldesruhe in the southern Cape and the subsequent promotion of honeybush farming. The study identifies brokers both in the village and in various government departments and the technology-providing science council involved. Waldesruhe, a former mission station and coloured rural reserve, provides a fertile basis for brokers and the development of brokerage capabilities used to mediate these two rural development interventions of land redistribution and honeybush production. The study is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork that included extensive participant observation, workshops, formal and informal interviews, archival research and the analysis of policy and planning documents. In Waldesruhe in the Southern Cape, brokers and other mediators involved in a land redistribution and honeybush project had an influential effect on the outcomes of the interventions. Beneficiary brokers were, at times, able to mediate land redistribution in the favour of beneficiaries and manipulate officials. Artful brokers used their mediation skills to attract support and resources for projects and to shape them, while other, less influential actors also managed to mediate and influence the project. These findings illustrate that development implementers and recipients have different ideas or logics about the opportunities and resources that development projects avail, and tend to reappropriate these for their own needs. Brokers and other actors are thus not neutral intermediaries and their agency affects development implementation and outcomes. The study shows that mediation needs to be recognised as an intrinsic part of the development process. Development needs to be understood as a social process combining many events, interactions, ideas and models that determine its outcomes, while mediation mitigates only some of these. The outcomes of brokerage and mediation are tempered by the changing positionality and influence of the mediators, while neither the habitus of the actors nor the historical-political economy and structural constraints can be ignored when evaluating the outcomes.