This book critically examines land and agrarian reform policies in post-apartheid South Africa. Notions of land and agrarian reform are well entrenched in the everyday life of a significant number of people in post-apartheid South Africa, as is evident when one visits government departments and meets policymakers and practitioners, attends academic and policy-oriented seminars, reads newspapers and media reports, or interacts directly with land reform beneficiaries and people in villages. What reform actually means for everyday life, however, varies considerably, as do the ways in which we study and understand land and agrarian reform processes. There are contrasting theoretical frameworks; the field of study is inherently multidisciplinary and complex, and varying experiences of historical events and situations colour our interpretations. Moreover, it is often forgotten that agrarian development policies have been designed and implemented in South Africa since the nineteenth century and that the current crop of policymakers had little or no experience in dealing with land and agrarian reform when the reform process started.

The purpose of the book is neither to provide an extensive review of academic debates, nor to argue that land reform has failed outright to achieve its objectives. Rather, the book aims to set out a number of themes that are drawn from the broader literature on land and agrarian reform as well as from empirical case studies that reconstruct everyday experiences of land and agrarian reform, and how both may inform policy and research agendas. The debates revolve around a number of pertinent issues, informing and shaping the collection of papers brought together in this book. The title of the book – In the Shadow of Policy: Everyday Practices in South African Land and Agrarian Reform – is suggestive of its methodology: by elucidating how a range of social actors (such as policymakers, state officials, beneficiaries, extension workers and so on) involved in the land and agrarian reform process engage with the ideas and actions of policy institutions, we will be able to document, as Long (2004a: 26 ff.) phrases it, ‘how these ideas are transmitted, contested, reassembled, and negotiated at the points where policy decisions and implementations impinge upon the life circumstances and everyday life-worlds of so-called “lay” or “non-expert” actors’.