Theories, policies and plans for settlement and resettlement in southern Africa are changing, but are they changing fast enough? Are such changes properly informed by the southern African and global experience with land settlement, and with increasingly serious environmental constraints, of which the most important are inadequate rainfall, surface flows and ground water? Are they sufficiently imaginative and innovative?

In regard to an awareness on the part of academics and policy makers of the experience within southern Africa and elsewhere, I think, if anything, that there is too much awareness of difficulties - to the extent that discussion of disappointing results, and reasons for those results, may be discouraging, rather than improving, further settlement planning, including strategies based on smallholder activities. That awareness is exemplified by the attention paid to settlement issues at the World Bank/UNDP organised November 1992 workshop in Swaziland on the international experience with various agricultural and rural development issues and the possible relevance of that experience for the New South Africa. It is also exemplified by a 1993 special issue of World Development based on revised versions of some of those workshop papers, including that of Kinsey and Binswanger on ‘Characteristics and performance of resettlement programs: a review’.

Additional papers were also contracted by the World Bank in connection with its involvement in attempts to restructure South Africa's rural development policies. They include Chris de Wet's ‘Resettlement as an aspect of a land reform programme in South Africa: some issues and recommendations’ (1993a), and documents, including mine on ‘Poverty reduction and gender issues’, prepared for the June-July 1994 Land and Agricultural Policy Centre (Johannesburg) conference that dealt with a range of options for land reform and rural restructuring in South Africa.

In this chapter, I wish to emphasise three points that I believe are critically important for the success of such programmes as the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). The first, made by a number of international experts including Michael and Merle Lipton (1993) but still viewed with some scepticism in South Africa, is the essential role that tens of thousands of small-scale households involved in both on- and off-farm activities, could play in both rural and peri-urban localities.