Arenas of contestation: policy processes and land tenure reform in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Summary: This thesis considers different groupings that have come together in their participation in the policy processes relating to tenure reform in post-apartheid South Africa. It is methodologically and theoretically grounded in Bourdieu's notion of cultural 'fields' spaces of ongoing contestation and struggle, but in which actors develop a shared 'habitus', an embodied history. In these land reform policies and law-making activities, individuals and groups from different fields- the bureaucratic, activist and legal - have interacted in their contestations relating to the legitimation of their forms of knowledge. The resulting compromises are illuminated by a case study of a village in the former Gazankulu 'homeland' - a fourth 'cultural field'. Rather than seeing these fields as bounded, the thesis recognises the influence of wider political discourses and materialities, or the wider 'field of power'. In each of the four very different fields, as a result of a shared history, actors within them have developed practices based upon particular shared discourses, institutions and values.