Policy-making and the corporatist state: three case studies of rural policy engagement in South Africa.

This dissertation examines three case studies where rural people have engaged with national rural development policy-making processes with support from civil society organisations. The case studies are a Labour Tenant Campaign for land rights, initiated in 1991 by labour tenant communities and civil society organisations in response to increasing attempts to evict labour tenant communities by landowners in the Eastern Transvaal (later Mpumalanga) and Natal (later Kwazulu-Natal). A second case study is a Farm Dweller Security of Tenure Campaign, undertaken by farm dweller communities and NGOs, church groups, and trade unions in 1995 to lobby for legislation to promote the security of tenure of communities living on private land in rural South Africa. A third case study, the Rural Development Initiative, involves an attempt to mobilise civil society organisations to highlight rural people’s demands through a Rural People’s Charter and to raise the priority of rural development amongst policy makers. The case studies trace the emergence of each initiative, and their relative influence on policy. In each case, the politics of engagement and the outcomes of the policy processes illustrate clearly the limited ways in which policy can be influenced by those who are affected most by its enactment. The dissertation argues that the obstacles presented by conditions of poverty and the relative political weakness of rural people in South African society have frustrated their attempts to influence policy to their own benefit. Further, the dissertation contends that these conditions are a direct result of the historical legacy of capitalist development in South Africa, and that their continuation is contingent on the current neo-liberal form and ideology of the South African state. The study provides an analysis of the role of the capitalist state and its contingent ideological basis to provide an illustration of the constraints posed by the policy-making process in a corporatist state. An analysis of the post-apartheid South African state, and its rural development policy, concludes that they are unlikely to provide any relief for poor people living in rural areas due to an adherence to the economic policy of neo-liberalism. The three case studies explore the interplay of ideology and policy processes, and illustrate how the complexity of the policy process increases the dependence of rural people on NGOs in the process of engagement.Mr. N. Mala