By Edward Lahiff

IDS Bulletin Vol 34 No 3 2003

Southern Africa today presents a wide spectrum of land policies, embracing a variety of forms of redistribution and tenure reform initiatives, utilising methods that range from consensual, market-based approaches to forcible confiscation. Having remained marginal to political debates in most countries of the region for much of the 1980s and 1990s, land and land reform are back on the policy agenda to an extent unknown since the liberation struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s. Recent events in Zimbabwe, in particular, have had strong resonance for political parties and landless people in those countries, most notably South Africa and Namibia, where severe racial inequalities in landholding persist, and struggles over land have become central to external perceptions of the region. Critical questions, therefore, are whether the Zimbabwean case is exceptional or an indication of tensions throughout the region, and whether the heightened political importance of land in the region is a product of changes in the regional or global economy, or a culmination of long-running processes at a more local level.