Land rights in rural South Africa: Creating a record of practice in an ongoing crisis

该项目以南非姆普马兰加省服务不足的农村社区迪克西争夺优质土地为背景，探讨该区域被迫流离失所、隔离政策、服务提供延误和经济不平等现象对人的影响和社会文化后果。迪克西包括毗邻克鲁格国家公园利润丰厚的公私合营企业的土地;因此，迪克西的土地几十年来一直是社区成员、地方当局和私人开发商之间争议的对象。一场争端最终导致宪法法院的一个里程碑式的案件。尽管如此，2019年底，当社区成员、地方当局和私人开发商在权利和使用权上发生冲突时，土地权利再次受到争议。这是一个微观案例，发生在该国正在努力解决复杂的更广泛的土地改革问题之际。像这样的冲突，在南非各地展开（在全球南部也有类似情况），在很大程度上仍然没有记录：个人和社区在特定的历史、社会、文化和经济环境中日复一日做出的决定，没有保存在任何档案中。这反过来又意味着，不可能对这些斗争及其结果进行系统的短期或长期反思或评估。其后果是，各个社区无法有效地从自己过去的行动中学习，社区也无法相互学习。他们也不能将自己的知识聚合起来，以了解问题的范围，并考虑最有效的解决方案。社区无法反思这些斗争是如何受到性别、能力、年龄、语言或家庭关系等社会事实的影响--并反过来影响这些社会事实的。因此，人类对这些危机的基本知识和学习充其量是支离破碎的，最坏的情况是消失了。直接与迪克西居民和当地基层发展组织Pala Forerunners合作，我们将采用社区主导的合作制作方法来管理，监控，记录，分析和评估这一非常复杂的经济，政治，社会和文化争端。我们将制作一个深入的，社区设计的这场斗争的生活经历档案，包括笔记和日记，记录关键决定，里程碑，个人反思，当地的剥夺和流离失所的历史。该档案将为农村居民设计新的实用土地纠纷教学材料提供信息，并将成为当前做法和潜在最佳做法的案例研究，这只是南非和全球南方更广泛的产权和纠纷问题的一个实例。

This project addresses the human dimensions and socio-cultural consequences of a regional experience of forced displacement, Apartheid policies, service delivery delays, and economic inequality - within the context of an unfolding contest over prime property land in the underserved rural community of Dixie, in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. Dixie includes land adjacent to the extremely profitable public-private enterprises of the Kruger National Park; for this reason, Dixie land has been the object of disputes between community members, local authorities, and private developers for decades. One dispute culminated in a landmark case in the Constitutional Court. Nonetheless, land rights once again came under contention in late 2019, when community members, local authorities, and private developers came into conflict over rights and access.This is a microcosmic case, occurring at a time when the country is grappling with the complex broader issue of land reform. Conflicts like this, unfolding across South Africa (with parallels across the Global South), remain largely undocumented: the decisions taken by individuals and communities within particular historical, social, cultural, and economic circumstances, day by day, are not maintained in any archive. This, in turn, means that there can be no systematic short or long-term reflection on or assessment of these struggles and their outcomes. The consequences are that individual communities cannot effectively learn from their own past actions, and communities cannot learn from each other. Nor can they aggregate their knowledge to understand the scope of the problem and consider the most effective solutions. And communities cannot reflect on how these struggles are influenced by - and in turn influence - social facts such as gender, ability, age, language, or familial relations. As a result, essential human knowledge and learning around such crises are at best fragmented and at worst disappearing. Working directly with Dixie residents and local grassroots development organisation Pala Forerunners, we will apply methods of community-led co-production to manage, monitor, record, analyse and evaluate this extraordinarily complex economic, political, social, and cultural dispute as it happens. We will produce an in-depth, community-designed archive of the lived experiences of this struggle, including notes and journals, documenting key decisions, milestones, personal reflections, local histories of dispossession and displacement. The archive will inform the design of new, practical instructional materials for rural residents in land disputes, and will constitute a case study for current practice and potential best practice, in just one instantiation of a much broader problem of property rights and disputes across South Africa and the Global South.