KZN Planning and Development Commission LUMSRA

Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas

KwaZulu-Natal Planning & Development Commission

Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas First Published in 2010 by KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Commission Private Bag X9038 Pietermaritzburg 3200 PR323/2010 ISBN: 978-0-621-39766-6 This document is available from: KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Commission 12th Floor Natalia Building 330 Langalibalele Street Pietermaritzburg 3201 OR Private Bag X9038 Pietermaritzburg 3200 Tel: 033 395 3067 Fax: 033 345 3647 Email: ppdc@kznlgta.gov.za Website: www.kznpdc.gov.za The reproduction of the contents of this document, whether in whole or in part, for publication is prohibited unless permission is first obtained in writing from the KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Commission, Private Bag X 9038, Pietermaritzburg, 3200, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

The contents of this publication, whilst being the views of the author, do not necessarily represent the views of the KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Commission.

1. Table of Contents

Page

Foreword

4

Acknowledgements

5

Executive Summary

6

1.

2.

3.

Purpose of the Study Research Design Key Findings on Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas

6 6 7

a) b) c) d) e)

7 7 7 8 8

4.

5.

Realities of Land Use Management Systems Policy and Practice Issues Technological Support of Land Use Management Systems Institutional Linkages in LUMS Community Participation

Conclusions Recommendations for Change

8 9

Glossary of Vernacular Terms Chapter 1: Introduction and Methodology

10 12

A. B. C. D.

12 12 12 13

Statement of the Research Problem Broad Purpose and Specific Objectives Central Research Questions Outline of Research Design

Chapter 2: Literature Review on Land Use Planning and Management

15

1.

2.

3.

Introduction and Background Land Use Management Systems (LUMS): A Conceptual Framework The Socio-Historical Contexts of LUMS

15 16 18

a. b.

18 19

4.

5.

Socio-Political Concerns of LUMS in Society Traditional Leadership and LUMS

Policy Context of LUMS Trends, Patterns and Models of Current Practices

22 26

a. b. c.

26 28 30

Trends in Land Use Management Practice Patterns in Land Use Management Practice: The Evolution of Tools Land Use Management Models i. ii.

Use of Technology to Enhance Data Accuracy and Incorporate Local Knowledge in land use planning Engaging Community to Collect their Local Culture Information and develop a community vision in land use planning

30 31

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas iii. iv. v.

6.

7.

Enhancing Human Resource Development in Municipalities to Ensure Quality Land Use Planning Implementation Strategies Used Across Different Countries Monitoring and Evaluation of Land Use Planning Tools

A Conundrum in Policy and Practice Conclusions on the Literature

32 32 33 34 36

Chapter 3: Findings

38

1.

2.

Introduction Provisioning of LUMS at Government Levels a.

Provincial Guidelines on LUMS and their Effectiveness b.

The Responsiveness of LUMS to Traditional Council Lands in KZN c.

Availability and use of Technology in LUMS

38 38 38 40 41

3.

LUMS at Local Government Level: the Case of Three Communities

44

a)

Jozini Case Study Community

44

i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. viii.

44 46 48 49 49 51 51 52

b)

c)

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Community Profile Land Use, Planning and Management in Jozini The Use of Policy Provision in Facilitating LUMS The Institutional Linkages in Facilitating LUMS Community Participation in LUMS The role of Technology in the implementation of LUMS Conclusions: Implications for Policy and Practice Recommendations for Change

Mandeni Case Study Community

53

i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. viii.

53 54 56 57 57 58 58 59

Community Profile Land Use, Planning and Management in Mandeni The Use of Policy Provision in Facilitating LUMS The Institutional Linkages in Facilitating LUMS Community Participation in LUMS The role of Technology in the implementation of LUMS Conclusions: Implications for Policy and Practice Recommendations for Change

Nkandla Case Study Community

60

i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. viii.

60 61 65 65 66 67 67 68

Community Profile Land Use, Planning and Management in Nkandla The Use of Policy Provision in Facilitating LUMS The Institutional Linkages in Facilitating LUMS Community Participation in LUMS The role of Technology in the implementation of LUMS Conclusions: Implications for Policy and Practice Recommendations for Change

Chapter 4: The Nature of Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas

69

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

69 70 71 72 73 74

Introduction Realities of Land Use, Planning and Management in Rural Areas Policy Landscape and Implication for Practice in LUMS Technological Support of LUMS Institutional Linkages in LUMS Community Participation: Deliberative or Pretence?

Chapter 5: Conclusions: Implications for Policy and Practice

77

Chapter 6: Recommendations for Effecting Change

79

1.

National Level Practitioners

79

a. b. c. d.

79 80 80 81

2.

Provincial Level Practitioners a. b. c.

3.

4.

National Planning Commission Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (COGTA) Department of Human Settlements Department of Rural Development and Land Reform

81

KwaZulu-Natal Department of Cooperative Government and Traditional Affairs (KZNCOGTA) 81 KwaZulu-Natal Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (RDLR) 82 Ingonyama Trust Board 82

Local Level Practitioners

83

a. b.

83 84

District and Local municipalities Local Communities

Multi-Sectoral Collaboration

85

References

86

Notes

92

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas FOREWORD The KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Commission has pleasure to present this work to the planning and development practitioners dealing with spatial development issues, in particular land use management in rural areas. This work is a step forward in a series of attempts by the Commission to pause and reflect through research on the challenges and complexities of planning demands in the context of wider attention, both geographically and in terms of different socio-cultural contexts, with which planning has to function. We hope, through this study, that we are able to encourage conversations not only between planning practitioners, but also between them and the communities with whom they work.

The Commission has previously done a lot of ‘scoping work’ related to spatial patterns and concepts in the rural areas – these previous projects were looking at socio-cultural issues, indigenous knowledge, and linkages between local government and traditional leadership. The Commission has also been acutely aware of the need to be conscious about capacity of municipalities in performing their mandate and being responsive to the needs of their communities. Projects related to assessment of capacity and assessment of complexity of integrating development, have also been done before. We view this project as a step forward because in addition to documenting multiple perspectives on spatial planning in rural areas, it ventures into developing a toolkit on land use management for rural areas under traditional leadership. It is a brave task that is done while acknowledging the policy context that may have been developed before sufficiently reflecting on the compatibility of previous planning paradigms and conceptions of indigenous land use management. Thus this project must be seen as a groundbreaker both on innovative planning and on encouraging conversation.

The Commission hopes this work goes a long way in being a catalyst of innovative thinking for development for all.

Chairperson KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Commission

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work was supported by a number of people and it is imperative to acknowledge with appreciation their valuable contribution. These include Commissioners, Commission staff, Steering Committee members, and additional SRDC staff members who contributed.

While demonstrating that they believed in our team, Commissioners played an important role in giving invaluable critical comments on the milestones of the project. These were: 1.

2.

3.

Professor MP Sithole (Chairperson of the Steering Committee and Deputy Chairperson of the Commission) Dr. DS Rajah (Commissioner) Ms. R Motala (Commissioner)

Staff members of the Commission who supported this work in terms of administration and giving inputs were: 1.

2.

3.

Mrs. P Shanmugam (Manager of the Commission) Mrs. R Heeralal (Communications Officer) Bishop M Makhaye (Chairperson of the Commission)

In addition to the members of the Commission, there were other members who formed part of the Steering Committee. These also made valuable contribution at different stages of the research process in meetings.

They are: 1.

KwaZulu-Natal Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs a. b. c. d. e.

2.

KwaZulu-Natal Rural Development and Land Reform a. b.

3.

Mr. J Kiepiel (Municipal Strategic Planning) Ms. S Kala (Spatial Planning) Ms. Sibiya (Spatial Planning) Mr. SI Mkhize (Town and Regional Planning) Mr. M Sithole (Traditional Affairs)

Mr. R Hoole (Spatial Planning) Ms. S. Nene (Spatial Planning)

ILembe District Municipality a.

Ms. R Hulley (Spatial Planning)

The additional Sandile Research and Development Consultants staff members that supported the team with all internal processes relating to administrative support and making expert inputs were Mr FS Mbokazi (Development Officer) and Ms NP Mbokazi (Administrative Officer).

We are also grateful to the informants at provincial departments and institutions, as well as in three municipalities of Jozini, Mandeni and Nkandla that participated in the study.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 1.

Purpose of the Study

Sandile Research and Development Consultants cc was commissioned by the KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Commission to investigate, and provide guidelines to address, the concern that spatial planning tools used currently in KwaZulu-Natal are unable to cater effectively for rural communities. Central issues of investigation in the study are as follows: • • •

Investigating alternative models for dealing with land use related issues –specifically within the rural context of KwaZulu-Natal –which are informed by recent legislation.

The provision of a set of scheme clauses and maps as part of the model created to facilitate the Land Use System issues.

A Geographic Information System (GIS) that manages spatial information in the form of a guiding document that will be a user friendly toolkit to relevant stakeholders.

In the process of conducting this study, the key research questions were: • • •

• • • •

2.

What are some of the trends and patterns of best practices recorded in local and international literature on Land Use Management Systems?

How responsive are the current LUMS in dealing with land under traditional authorities, issues of a fragile and threatened ecosystem, and addressing a buoyant tourism industry?

To what extent do current LUMS cater for declining and emerging areas of economic activity, land and property development, rural economies and various standards of living (income, wealth and levels of poverty)?

To what extent are existing systems, procedures, and technical support available to traditional councils useful for spatial planning and land allocation purposes?

What are problems and obstacles associated with land allocation in rural areas?

How can the system of spatial planning and land allocation be improved in rural contexts?

How to creatively and innovatively formulate a model that can collaborate the traditional systems LUMS and the legislative or legal requirements?

Research Design

The study uses a qualitative research approach to produce data useful to guide the implementation of land use management systems (LUMS) in rural communities of KwaZulu-Natal. A comparative case study method was used and communities were selected based on their differences and unique attributes which would have to be considered in planning and development processes as well as their successes and challenges faced. These include geographical spread within the province, types of land uses, land ownership and tenure systems, location along national or provincial roads, and history of betterment planning.

In each of these cases spatial planning and land allocation processes were critically examined. The research design for this study entails six crucial components outlined below: 1.

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A literature review of land use practices and trends in terms of the legislative and policy directives provided both a theoretical and conceptual basis for data collection and analysis, as well as reporting of findings. The literature also included a comparative analysis of practical models which are used by other municipalities elsewhere in the world and in South Africa in terms of land use planning and management.

2.

3.

Three case study communities were identified based on their unique nature so as to capture the complexities and the varieties of issue of land use planning and management. These were Jozini, Mandeni and Nkandla municipalities.

Spatial data was captured and analysed in GIS, with every selected site having a proper polygon and a point of reference in a detailed attribute table.

4.

The information gathered from literature and through in-depth interviews with stakeholders, and through GIS processes was analysed by means of a QSR NVivo software, which was develop by sociologists to simplify qualitative data analysis.

5.

Once the draft report and the toolkit were compiled, these were presented at a workshop to an audience of not less than eighty practitioners from provincial government departments, municipalities, and traditional councils as well as the private sector. Inputs made at the workshop were incorporated to the final documents.

6.

The overall report first and foremost foregrounds the unique features of each selected case community in terms of land use systems, and to compare and contrast systems represented in these case studies. The report also makes recommendations based on the suggestions made by informants and the literature consulted.

3.

Key Findings on Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas

a)

Realities of Land Use Management Systems Land use planning and management tools available in different municipalities to deal with land in rural areas often ignore unique land uses and traditional ways of managing them, and thus are incompatible with the life circumstances and conditions in these areas. In addition, the seasonality of some of the land uses that exists in rural areas was also ignored in the spatial planning tools.

b)

Policy and Practice Issues The portrayal of the IDP in the Municipal Systems Act of 2000 and in the KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Act (No.6 of 2008) ignores communities’ perspectives and their indigenous knowledge, because it assumes a certain level of homogeneity of these communities. There is no depth in, and meaningful commitment to, interactive practice towards identification of those communities historically have had no access to basic municipal services.

Prescriptions about alignment with national and provincial sectoral plans introduce a dynamic that does not favour bottom-up approach to planning. Capturing diversity through a uniform approach is not clearly articulated.

c)

Technological Support of Land Use Management Systems It was found that the limitation with this system in selected municipalities is that sometimes GIS operators were unavailable; there was over-reliance on experts to the exclusion of grassroots people, and there is partially accurate spatial information, which characterises the quality of support available for land-related decision makers in rural areas.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas Internationally, there is a move in GIS tools within spatial planning towards combining local knowledge with academic knowledge in order to facilitate sustainable development programmes. This is done to democratise spatial data, properly geo-referencing indigenous lands within agreed upon indigenous zoning principles. The entire system in South Africa remains far behind in terms of aligning with international trends, because it has not moved to embrace the latest concepts such as Community-Integrated Geographical Information System (CIGIS) and its related concepts. d)

Institutional Linkages in LUMS Weak institutional linkages are to blame for experiences arising out of the fact that same land has been allocated by two separate authorities, i.e. as double land allocation, multiple and clashing development plans, as well as unnecessary delays in land use and management processes. It should be noted that spatial planning decisions are not about tools or plans themselves, but are about people. This human factor can be adequately catered for by ensuring that proper linkages among all stakeholders involved are strengthened for sustainability purposes.

Synergistic partnership between municipalities and traditional councils were established in two municipalities that participated in the study, but was not working effectively, because of poor commitment of parties involved. In the third municipality, the working relationship between traditional leadership and municipalities was achieved without the formal structure of a synergistic partnership. Protocol for a synergistic partnership must specify LUMS procedures that are inclusive of both traditional councils and the municipality. The planning aspect of this synergy must include proper management of this protocol.

e)

Community Participation Philosophical underpinnings of community participation and its divergent ideologies have been a reason why platforms for people participation in spatial planning created in municipalities are non-existent, poor or unsustainable. Participation has been reduced to consulting, informing, involving, and obtaining communities’ buy-in on spatial planning tools. These are not always synonymous to meaningful participation and the purpose of meaningful participation is compromised in such an exercise.

The preoccupation with “involving”, “informing” and “consulting” people in order to get their “buy-in” in ready-made plans –evident in all three selected municipalities –promotes a situation where community participation is no better than imposition. Most people in three selected communities still felt excluded from land use management and development planning decisions despite being represented in a number of structures, such as Ward Committees, that were created for their inclusion in decision-making processes. This is linked to differences in conceptions of land use management that exist in different society.

4.

Conclusions

Poor land use planning and management have gripped rural areas because the model for land use management system came with very little mechanisms to deal with land under traditional leadership in terms of spheres of communality and indigenous knowledge systems. The toolkit that was produced as part of this project tries to suggest innovative ways in which the land use and management problems can be handled and resolved.

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Although some provincial guidelines for producing spatial planning tools in municipalities acknowledge the need to deepen democracy and complement the training of planners to enhance their usefulness in preparing the tools, they are weak in understanding the sociology of planning that promote the incorporation of local knowledge in planning processes.

Most problems related to dealing with land in rural areas are linked to weaknesses in linkages among various institutions that make decisions on land. Though synergistic partnerships have been formed in at least two of the selected municipalities, they were not working properly.

Limitations in the use of technology in LUMS were found in the selected municipalities. Sometimes GIS specialists were unavailable to enable the GIS system to be fully operational. There was over-reliance on experts in generating spatial data to the exclusion of grassroots people. Spatial information at district and local levels were partially accurate. Unfortunately, all these point to the quality of support available for land-related decision makers in rural areas.

5.

Recommendations for Change

At the national and provincial levels, policies must ensure that tools for land use management systems are beneficial to communities by ensuring that these are prepared in a participatory manner that seriously considers the indigenous knowledge. Communities must participate fully in the preparation and implementation of such tools within the principles of deliberative democracy.

Central to this, is establishing realistic community visions and mission statements that would inform the preparation of responsive tools for land use planning and management in order to cater for people’s needs at various levels of age, language and education as well as their aspirations for the future.

Mechanisms for carefully considering the social logics that are informed by indigenous knowledge systems and shape the spatial planning discourses and practices in communities are crucial for developing platforms for institutional linkages and community participation. Those social logics that appear to undermine the social justice that put people first should be challenged at all levels of policy formulation and implementation.

Plans and tools must never be sustained at the expense of the people, if they are meant to better the lives of the people. It is the responsibility of all spheres of government to ensure that the dignity of the people and their ways of life is restored and protected.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas GLOSSARY OF VERNACULAR TERMS 1.

Isilo: means a senior traditional leader who is the Monarch, according to the tradition, and is recognised by the legislation.

2.

Inkosi: means a senior traditional leader as defined in section 1 of the traditional leadership and Governance Framework Act (No.41 of 2003) and recognised as such in terms of section 19 of the KwaZulu-Natal Leadership and Governance Act (No.5 of 2005). Amakhosi is a plural form of the term.

3.

Induna: is a traditional leader who is under the authority of –or exercises authority within the areas of jurisdiction of –an Inkosi in accordance with customary law and who is recognised as such in terms of Section 27 of the KwaZulu-Natal Traditional Leadership and Governance Act (No.5 of 2005). Izinduna is a plural form of the term.

4.

Isigodlo: are traditional palaces for Isilo and Amakhosi and are often used for the purposes of residential, administrative and recreational (including cultural festivities). Izigodlo is a plural form of the term.

5.

Izishozi: are places such as mountains that are considered extremely dangerous because of frequent thunderstorms and lightning strikes. Land allocation for residential purposes in such places is not allowed for ordinary members of the community. Only izinyanga (traditional healers) are allowed in such places because of their perceived ability to control thunderstorms.

6.

Ukukhonza: is a form of submission to the rules and customs of land application in a traditional community. The term also means a formal request for land from traditional leaders.

7.

Ukubekwa: is a traditional ceremony where a site is awarded or transferred by the induna or traditional leaders mandated by the inkosi to the applicant. In this ceremony, traditional beer is usually served by the applicant to all the parties involved.

8.

Umuzi: are traditional human settlement, with predominantly rondavel design and inclusive of a number of land uses, such as izivande (household garden), amathuna (graves), isibaya (kraals) and izinqolobane (vegetable storage). Imizi is a plural form of the term. Imizi is a plural form of the term.

9.

Umbila: is defined as maize.

10.

Ubhatata: is defined as sweet potatoes.

11.

Ikhaphelo: are facilities where cattle graze during winter seasons. Amakhaphelo is a plural form of the term.

12.

Idlelo: are facilities where cattle graze in summer. Amadlelo is a plural form of the term.

13.

Inkambu: are facilities where cattle graze in fenced vicinity and these are not bound by seasons. Izinkambu is a plural form of the term.

14.

Insimu: communal vegetable fields largely used for subsistence, and minimally used for commercial purposes in rural areas. Amasimu is a plural form of the term.

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15.

Amahlathi Emvelo: are valuable indigenous forests that contribute to livelihood fire-wood for cooking and traditional herbs for medicine used by traditional healers.

16.

Iziphethu and imithombo: are water bodies which work as a back-up water system in rural communities.

Amagquma: hills used for communication purposes in rural areas in the absence of latest telecommunication technology, as landmarks, and for locating livestock –because it often gives people proper view in searching for these.

17.

18.

Isivande: are gardens located in household and on communal land, either owned by individuals or shared by communities. Izivande is a plural form of the term.

19.

Isigcawu: are often in a form of a tree and vacant plot. Izigcawu is a plural form of the term. Traditional protocols are often followed in using izigcawu. These provide platforms for cultural festivities such as imigcagco, imemulo, etc, and accessible to all people.

20.

Umcako: is an indigenous mineral used for building painting and for medicinal purposes. Imicako is a plural form of the term.

21.

Ibomvu: is an indigenous mineral use by women for facial paint as a sun screen and as skin treatment.

22.

Ubumba: is clay often used for traditional pots and toys. Women also use this to relax their hair.

23.

Amadiphu: are dipping facilities where cattle’s get disinfected.

24.

Izikhonkwane: are traditional lightening conductors used to protect households lightning strikes in rural residential areas and they are supplied by the traditional healers

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION AND METHODOLOGY A.

Statement of the Research Problem

The land use management model that is currently being used in KwaZulu-Natal does not adequately address spatial planning needs of rural communities within the context of wall-to-wall municipalities.

B.

Broad Purpose and Specific Objectives

This study seeks to understand the current spatial planning processes and considerations for rural areas that can be used to develop land use management systems for rural areas. The main objective of the study is to investigate the processes, systems and procedures that are currently being used by traditional councils to allocate land for different uses and to develop guidelines to promote efficient land use and sustainable development. In pursuance of the specific objective, the following central issues are tackled, and these are: 1.

2.

3.

C.

Investigating alternative models for dealing with land use related issues –specifically within the rural context of KwaZulu-Natal –within the context of recent legislation.

The provision of a set of scheme clauses and maps as part of the model created to facilitate the Land Use System issues.

A Geographic Information System (GIS) that manages spatial information in the form of a guiding document that will be a user friendly toolkit to relevant stakeholders.

Central Research Questions

The core overarching question underpinning this study is: What are alternative models that can be used by planners to adequately address land use management needs of rural areas within the context of wall-to-wall municipalities? There are seven critical research questions that guide the research dialogue and conversations in this study, and these feed into the core question stated above. These questions are: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

What are some of the trends and patterns of best practices recorded in local and international literature on Land Use Management Systems?

How responsive are the current LUMS in dealing with land under traditional authorities, issues of a fragile and threatened ecosystem, and addressing a buoyant tourism industry?

To what extent do LUMS cater for declining and emerging areas of economic activity, land and property development, rural economies and various standards of living (income, wealth and levels of poverty)?

To what extent are existing systems, procedures, and technical support available to traditional councils useful for spatial planning and land allocation purposes?

What are problems and obstacles associated with land allocation in rural areas?

How can the system of spatial planning and land allocation be improved in rural contexts?

How to creatively and innovatively formulate a model that can collaborate the traditional systems LUMS and the legislative or legal requirements?

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D.

Outline of Research Design

The study uses a qualitative research approach and it employs three methods to produce data that is useful to guide the implementation of land use management systems (LUMS) in rural communities of KwaZulu-Natal.

These methods are semi-structured interviews with selected informants, focus group discussions with community-based stakeholders and documentary analysis. A comparative case study method was used and communities were selected based on their unique planning and development successes and challenges. These include geographical spread within the province, types of land uses, land ownership and tenure systems, location along national or provincial roads, and history of betterment planning.

The selection of these cases was a collaborative exercise between the KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Commission and the Sandile Research and Development Consultants Team. In each of these cases spatial planning and land allocation processes are critically examined. One of the end products of the project is a toolkit that will assist KwaZulu-Natal municipalities in their spatial planning. The research design for this study entails six crucial components outlined below: 1.

A literature review of land use practices and trends in terms of the legislative and policy directives was done. This provided both a theoretical and conceptual basis through which research instruments for data collection and an informed tool to analyse the findings in this study were developed. The literature also included a comparative analysis of practical models which are used by other municipalities elsewhere in the world and in South Africa in terms of land use management planning and schemes.

2.

Three case study communities were identified based on their differences and unique attributes so as to capture the complexities and the varieties of issues relating to land use planning and management. The chosen areas are geographically situated in the Northern and the middle part of KwaZulu-Natal province.

In each of these contexts land use management trends, issues, priorities, and expectations are examined qualitatively. The table below outlines the selected case study communities and some justifications thereof. Two of these –Jozini and Nkandla –were finalised at an inception meeting that was held on the 06th of April 2010, and the decision on the third one –Mandeni –was taken later on in collaboration with the senior leadership of the municipality concerned. These communities and the reasons for their selection are outlined in the table below:

Context Selected Sites Justifications Northern KZN Jozini • Jozini dam is designed to irrigate more than 80 000 hectares of agricultural land The Jozini • local municipality has identified the need for park and recreational zones at Jozini to boost the local economy through tourism Middle KZN Mandeni • Commercial agriculture for sugar canes, • Land ownership is being transferred from commercial farmers to communities.

• Wildlife experience, coastal strip, medium scale farming.

Middle KZN Nkandla • Land is administered by traditional leaders.

• It holds the treasures of the Zulu nation’s history.

• There are Graves for King Malandela and King Cetshwayo. Matshenezimpisi Game Reserve owned by a traditional council

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas 3.

One of the key research outcomes is a GIS toolkit. This toolkit, apart from providing guidelines to innovative zoning, it also outlines detailed requirements and specifications for the development of a GIS application in the near future. GIS is a useful support tool for LUMS implementation through data analysis, creation of maps, graphs and charts, data validation and maintenance, linking schemes onto a Provincial database using RGB colours (Red, Green & Blue).

4.

Spatial data was captured and analysed in GIS. Every selected site has a proper GIS polygon and a point of reference with a detailed attribute table. All spatial data was prepared in Arc View 3.2 in the form of shapefiles on an agreed format or (WGS 84) format.

5.

Information gathered from literature and through in-depth interviews with stakeholders, and through GIS processes was analysed by means of QSR NVivo software, which was developed by sociologists to simplify qualitative data analysis. This software helps researchers to manage literature review and store data conveniently, thus allowing researchers to handle very large data sets, perform complex searches and organise materials that might otherwise be overlooked (Davis, 2007). Specific information was presented using GIS maps to illustrate the arguments for discussion in the overall report.

6.

This report start off by highlighting the unique features of each selected case study community in terms of land use systems, and to compare and contrast systems represented in these case studies. The report makes recommendations based on the findings and suggestions made by informants, the workshop, as well as the literature consulted.

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CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW ON LAND USE PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT 1.

Introduction and Background

The literature review section provides some background information about land issues in various contexts, highlighting among others, the issues relating to the availability and quality of arable land. In addition, the utilisation of land and consequences thereof in these contexts are highlighted. The sections below provide first and foremost a conceptual framework, socio-historical context of land use management system (LUMS) –including socio-political concerns and traditional leadership in relation to LUMS, the policy context, trends, patterns and models of current practices, land use management models as well as ‘the conundrum in policy and practice’. This conundrum capture tensions, disjuncture, gaps, silences and vagueness in policy and practice in the South African policy landscape that needs to be understood towards finding ways to improving land use planning and management in municipalities.

The availability and utilisation of land is an important factor in land use management and planning. Globally, about 770 billion hectares of land are cropped intensely at 78%, which means that an annual harvested area is about 600million hectares (Davidson, 1992). It has been noted that the expansion of arable land, along with increases in cropping intensities, will account for about 40% of the growth in production and in order to achieve required production levels for 2000 (Davidson, 1992). In Canada, the issues of arable land were faced with loss of good quality land due to urbanisation, recreation, transportation and land degradation. Despite land losses, a net annual increase in arable land was evident in some developing countries (Davidson, 1992). Global land resources need continuous updating with respect to adequate provision of food in response to better environment resource data, the improvement of yield prediction models, changing population needs and the impact of environmental change on land resources (Davidson, 1992).

In Southern Africa arable land is scarce, in that only 6% of land has been described as arable, and the proportion of arable land ranges from 0.5% in Botswana to 1% in Namibia, 8% in Zimbabwe and 18% in Malawi (Kanyeze, Kondo, & Martens, 2006). The variations in arability, rainfall and rural population density have direct effects on the agricultural potential of countries in the region. The population to land ratio has direct implications for access to land, and there has been a trend towards land shortage and landlessness in such countries as Lesotho, Malawi, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe (Kanyeze, Kondo, & Martens, 2006). This disjuncture is epitomised by low growth and food security, and this is a major weakness of most economies in the region.

A land use management system plays an important role in promoting sustainable development that does not negatively affect the quality of land.

Studies have emphasised that the quality of land is an important factor for various land uses, and it is imperative that land use management systems in different countries take this into consideration (Lovejoy, 1979; Weller, 1979; Davidson, 1992; Montgomery, 2000). It was indicated that almost one-half of the soil in the world with good physical and biological potential are already in use and there is a dire need for increasing productivity from such areas (Davidson, 1992). The areas of arable cultivation could be increased from 1.4 billion hectares to 3.2 billion hectares and an extra 1.8 billion would not require additional irrigation beyond existing wells and streams and over one-half of these areas are located at the tropical streams. Revelle (1976) concluded that 3.2 billion hectares of land could be cropped without irrigation, and this can be increased to 4.2 billion if irrigation was used (Davidson, 1992). Pawey (1971) gives an optimistic value of 7 billion for potential arable land use.

Buringh (1985) says 12% of the earth’s surface (at that time being grassland and forest) had a potential for crop production (Davidson, 1992). These marked variations in estimates are due to poor global soil, climatic database, variations in management level, agricultural investments, economics of particular farming systems and the financial ability of farmers to buy compost or fertilisers (Davidson, 1992).

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas There are dire consequences of misuse, overusing and mismanagement of land, all of which relate to the absence or the failure to implement LUMS. Such consequences are deteriorating environment, over-exploitation, and over-cultivation. An escalating population growth rate often leads to excessive use and exhaustion of natural resources. Critical manifestations of these consequences are deforestation and over-grazing, all of which lead to loss of soil fertility, erosion, desertification or other forms of dereliction (Lovejoy, 1979). Central to agricultural change is the question of priorities in land use, i.e. whether agriculturists should determine the structure of the rural landscape and whether food production should have the traditional right of absorbing as much rural land as its owners think desirable (Weller, 1979). This notion has been advanced by Montgomery (2000) who states that increased levels of consumption by society and changes in technology and sociopolitical organisations often contribute to land degradation. Rural areas under the traditional land tenure are characterised by poverty and environmental degradation beyond the threshold of sustainability (Montgomery, 2000). If such a situation were to be allowed to continue, there are prospects for certain vital natural resources being declared depleted beyond the limits of their sustainable capacity (Montgomery, 2000).

In order to shape and contextualise our thinking about LUMS, a set of concepts that facilitate the discourses in land use management and planning is listed below. These concepts are land use management, land use planning, development planning, development control, as well as community participation. A set of assumptions, values, and definitions underpinning these concepts are discussed in the next section.

2.

Land Use Management Systems (LUMS): A Conceptual Framework

Discourses in LUMS are complex and are characterised by a number of concepts and approaches that are used in various countries, including both developed and developing. Some of the concepts pertinent to issues of land use, particularly in the context of a transforming society, include but are not limited to the following: land use management, land use planning, decentralisation, planning and zoning, and community participation in planning. Land use management denotes various systems through which the public sector seeks to establish influence over the way in which land is used –including the division of land into lots for different users, forms of activity, nature of buildings and densities of use (Chetty, 1998). Hence, a land use management system refers to all the actions that are required by a municipality to manage land (Kahn, von Riesen, & Jewel, 2001). This involves zoning, development control, and decision-making processes. The purpose of preparing a Land Use Management System is to “promote co-ordinated, harmonious and environmentally sustainable development, both in rural and urban areas” (Ntuli, 2003, p. 15). Land use planning is a component of land management which involves the approval and regulation of urban and rural land use (Peacock, 2002). It refers to a “systematic assessment of land and water potential, alternatives for land use and economic and social conditions in order to select and adopt best land use options” (FAO, 1993, cited in Peacock, 2000, p. 7).

Land use planning has two arms, namely, development planning and development control. Development planning refers to a situation where physical environment, including the presence or absence of transport, water and other utilities are evaluated and plans prepared about how different land uses and development can best be implemented in the public interest. Such type of planning stipulates broad outlines of land use policy to be applied, and these broad policy plans operate at various levels (Dale & McLaughlin, 1988, cited in Peacock, 2002). Development control is the implementation side of development planning, because it is where plans that were decided in the outline or policy plan are implemented. Where there is no zoning, which is a subdivision of development control, development of land is controlled in terms of conditions of titles (Peacock, 2002).

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Distinction between planning and zoning is crucial. While planning is concerned with the long-term development or preservation of an area and relationship between local objectives and overall community and regional goals, zoning is a major instrument for this (Cullingworth, 1993). A comprehensive plan deals with the needs of the existing inhabitants of an area, while meeting the needs for housing newcomers regardless of race and income levels (Cullingworth, 1993). It would also make provisions for undesirable land uses such as power stations, landfills, and a host of other uses which have given rise to the acronym NIMBY –“not in my back yard”, and later on NIMTOO –“not in my term of office” (Cullingworth, 1993). In other countries, planning systems are hierarchical in structure, with local planning agencies accountable to the higher levels of government (Cullingworth, 1993). Zoning entails designing various parcels of land for certain uses: commercial, residential, industrial, utilities, transport, recreation, bodies of water, flood plains and wildlife preserves (Chetty, 1998).The concept and principles of zoning first emerged as an attempt to separate noxious activities from residential uses. Zoning emerges as the primary tool for land use management yet it is not necessarily cadastral-based and inflexible (The Planning Initiative , 2005). This is an aspect of town planning which is primarily concerned with certain guidelines, restrictions or limitations on the use of land (Ntuli, 2003).

People or community participation in decision-making processes on issues directly affecting the citizens has become a ubiquitous concept in the development discourses of various countries including South Africa. Over the past three decades, some efforts have been made by the government and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) respectively to improve socio-economic welfare in rural communities (Prasad & Rajanikanth, 2006). However, people’s participation in such processes ranged from being a ‘means’ to being ‘an end’, to use Ife and Tesoriero (2006)’s conception of participation. According to Ife and Tesoriero (2006) participation is a means, when it is used to achieve some predetermined goal, utilising existing resources to achieve the set objectives of programmes (Ife & Tesoriero, 2006). The focus is more on achieving the objectives and not on participation itself, and this is seen as common in government programmes where the main concern is to mobilise the community and involve them in improving the efficiency of the delivery system (Ife & Tesoriero, 2006). In this way, participation is short-term and passive. Participation as an end attempts to empower people to participate in their own development more meaningfully and to increase the role of people in development initiatives (Ife & Tesoriero, 2006). The focus is on improving people’s ability to participate rather than just achieving the predetermined objectives of the project (Ife & Tesoriero, 2006). Here participation is viewed as a long-term process that is more active and dynamic (Ife & Tesoriero, 2006). This view of participation has been less favoured by government agencies and more favoured by NGOs. Poor commitment to participation, evident in recent studies conducted by the KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Commission, indicates that participation is largely a means and not an end in rural communities and this raises serious concerns in terms of land use management and planning processes. While community members were involved in identifying and prioritising their development needs, they had minimal or no participation at municipal council levels where these needs were reprioritised according to municipal budgets (KZNPDC, 2009b). Furthermore, feedback to the people about reprioritised needs has at best been poor and has left people wondering as to what had happened to their identified needs. As a result, different priorities at ward levels and Municipal Council levels of development needs were observed, and these had not been properly explained to the people who had identified those needs in the first place. This has led to imbalances in community participation with regards to traditional leadership and community involvement in Integrated Development Planning (IDP) processes (KZNPDC, 2009b).

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas Community participation is lacking in rural development, land use management and planning processes, despite the existence of somewhat trusted models such as Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA). PRA is a technique that is based on a premise that problems in specified areas are endemic and ongoing and therefore need commitment beyond mere consultation with the people concerned to address them. Central to this, is the importance of using local knowledge in development. Motivation to use knowledge of local practices is believed to result in the development of innovative and sustainable solutions (Peacock, 2002). However, the continued lack of community participation in rural development is symptomatic of the need to revise PRA as a model used towards establishing more appropriate models for dealing with rural areas.

3.

The Socio-Historical Contexts of LUMS

a.

Socio-Political Concerns of LUMS in Society Considering social and cultural aspects of development interventions is not a recent concern. It dates back when colonialists employed anthropologists and ethnologists to generate data and provide advice on native institutions and land tenure, though their goals were imperialist rather than development (Hulme & Turner, 1990). The need for sociological involvement in the planning process has continued with the recognition that repeated failures have plagued development programmes which were sociologically ill-informed and ill-conceived (Hulme & Turner, 1990). However, this recognition has not yet led to evolution of praxis for applied development sociology, or to the institutionalisation of sociologists or social anthropologists in the planning process of government and development agencies (Hulme & Turner, 1990). This experience and its implications for development and land use have played itself out differently in various regions of the world, including Southern Africa.

The history and political economy of Southern Africa has imposed a large imprint on societies and its present patterns of development. In some of the countries, for many years, there was a combination of white settler rule (Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe) and colonial occupation (Angola and Mozambique), as well as the rule of a variety of colonial protectorates (Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Swaziland and Zambia) (Kanyeze, Kondo, & Martens, 2006). The different forms of colonial penetration resulted in diverse land and agriculture sector policies. In addition, the divergent ecological environments in the various countries were a determinant to the development of different types of land use, cropping and livestock programmes (Kanyeze, Kondo, & Martens, 2006).

In South Africa, claims have been made that land use planning and zoning aim to ensure a higher quality of life (Feiock, 2001). A claim has been made that land use management systems (LUMS) provide a new dispensation for planning in the country since they extend beyond traditional town planning schemes, and covers entire municipalities in response to the new municipal demarcation (Forse, Doeseds, & Botes, 2002). Among other things, a key reason for the implementation of LUMS is to redress the injustices of apartheid planning and to provide a social, legal, economic and technical framework that must benefit the population at large (Williamson, 2001).The injustices of the past have resulted in a fragmented landscape and divided areas. Therefore, land administrations play a pivotal role in reshaping and redefining the spatial outlook of the country (Williamson, 2001). It is within these contexts that LUMS are expected to provide precise information for land administrators and decision makers, so as to aid them in the process of determining what land uses are relevant in the new South Africa (Briginshaw, 2006)

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In KwaZulu-Natal, there is an example of a one-size fits all approach to LUMS. According to the KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Commission (2001), the scope of land use management involves private and public sectors who develop and make use of land; law which sets out rules and procedures in the management system; agencies which make decisions on how land may be used at various level of government; plans which inform decisions on how land may be used for example, policy plans or zoning plans; and government officers who administer the system by preparing plans. The aim was to provide a commonly applicable LUMS that can be used throughout the province. However, this is problematic because it attests to the poor focus on the sociological aspect of planning. Some flaws were identified, and these include rigidity, resultant fragmentation and a bias towards homeowners (Fischel, 2002).

In 2005, an attempt to improve the focus of LUMS was done by the Commission to include a number of key elements, such as a valuation and rating system, a system for monitoring property ownership, a system for monitoring infrastructure and services, a system for incorporating building and health by-laws, a means for incorporating environmental issues and requirements, and finally, a means including transportation requirements (The Planning Initiative Team, 2005). These are important tools in the management of development. The objectives of the schemes in LUMS include promoting certain land uses and the economy; co-ordinating land use and general management of land; the designation of advantageous land uses; resolving conflicts between different land uses; balancing the desires of public interest as well as the individual; protecting natural resources as well as unique features and cultural resources; and a means of enforcing regulations (The Planning Initiative Team, 2005). The limitation of the revised LUMS, however, was that rural areas and their economies of scale were not adequately catered for, and this necessitated further studies, such as the application of indigenous knowledge systems in rural areas, land allocation in Ingonyama Trust land and the current land use management systems in rural areas. All these studies sought to unpack the status quo in rural areas towards establishing effective mechanisms for intervention. b.

Traditional Leadership and LUMS A focus on rural communities requires an in-depth understanding of power dynamics and institutions that exists therein. The institution of traditional leadership is the starting point and has long been the basis for local government in Africa during the pre-colonial times and most African societies are still ruled by this institution. The role of traditional leaders was to cater for every need of the different communities that they served, but in addition to this, the South African Constitution sees them as custodians of culture (Republic of South Africa, 1996; Shabangu & Khalo, 2008). Though traditional leadership roles are recognised by people in many countries, they are still not adequately systematised. Traditional leaders and their institutions often vary in nature within countries, but most of Southern African countries possess similar features with regard to the state of their traditional leadership institutions. Countries such as Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa do recognise, in their constitutions, the existence and importance of the institution of traditional leadership (Shabangu & Khalo, 2008). In these countries, the institution of traditional leadership is intended to co-exist and work in harmony with democratically elected structures such as municipalities.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas Traditional Council areas in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) are heterogeneous in terms of their leadership, tenure arrangements and land use and management practices. Some traditional areas include privately owned land and may also include commercial agriculture and subsistence agriculture and these variations across the Province imply that planners must deal with each traditional authority on a case-by-case basis (The Planning Initiative Team, 2005). Through the Municipal Demarcation Act (No. 27 of 1998), these areas are incorporated into municipal wards as part of wall-to-wall arrangements. However, rural areas have their own izigodi, which are traditional wards that have existed over time. The size for each isigodi cannot be measured, because boundaries are not formally demarcated, but are common knowledge among most local people (Ntuli, 2003). Traditional wards are usually smaller than the demarcated municipal wards, and it is possible that several izigodi can be found in one municipal ward. In each isigodi there is induna, who provides leadership on behalf of the senior traditional leader –Inkosi. In each isigodi there are imizi or traditional settlements that are monitored by an elderly person, called isibonda (Ntuli, 2003).

There are two primary benefits of communal land for communities, and these are access to communal amenities and sources of basic economic livelihoods as well as the provision of land. Communal amenities include wood, traditional medicinal plants, communal grazing land and thatching grass. The provision of land is often at no or nominal cost to sons and daughters wanting to move out of their parents’ homes and build an affordable home in proximity to their family (The Planning Initiative Team, 2005). This communal system is seen as less complicated in acquiring land and enjoying land use rights, but it requires to be understood within their particular contexts (The Planning Initiative Team, 2005). In Traditional Council areas, there is a strong correlation between customary practices and livelihood strategies and this correlation is a direct result of the experience of the former Natal and KwaZulu areas. For instance, the livestock farming in the former Natal was production based, commercially-oriented and centred on private land ownership, while in the former KwaZulu it was based on communal land tenure, with comparatively low levels of productivity and subsistence based agricultural economy where households were net consumers rather than producers of food (Lipton, Ellis, & Lipton, 1996). Variations were also observed in the two areas in terms of land allocation.

Land allocation process for residential purposes in rural areas is mostly facilitated through African Customary Law and it entails making a formal request to induna; attending a meeting arranged by induna with local residents to discuss that matter and take decision collectively; obtaining permission when the application is collectively approved; and celebrate Ukubekwa (Ntuli, 2003; Mbokazi, Ndlovu, Mtshali, & Bhengu, 2010). In addition, the successful applicant is allocated land for cultivation and is given the right to grazing land for the livestock. The use of appropriate language and terminology in land uses is important in Traditional Council areas, for instance, the term residential should be avoided, but traditional settlements or imizi be used instead (Ntuli, 2003). This is because traditional settlements include more than just a physical house structure, but it encompasses areas where activities such as traditional slaughter of animals and night rituals by religious groups take place (The Planning Initiative Team, 2005).

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In order to understand the uniqueness of rural areas, it is crucial to consider the depth of indigenous knowledge systems (IKS), which is the wealth of local knowledge that people in a particular area possess and share. Such knowledge shapes the ways in which people engage in any endeavour relating to land use, planning and development. Therefore, indigenous knowledge systems that exist in rural contexts is crucial in knowing people’s priorities and social problems, and how they think their problems can be tackled, and what specific options they think are needed to undertake the kind of planning that would resolve their issues (KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Commission, 2008a). This indigenous knowledge is lived and is part of an understanding of space and place, rituals and activities, history and understanding (Jordaan, Pureng, & Roos, 2008). It is tied to a particular place in a fundamental way and is specific to the peculiarity of a context. This is often in conflict with the generalised nature of western planning approaches (Forse, Doeseds, & Botes, 2002). The western planning paradigm requires sets of standards which are applicable everywhere, while indigenous knowledge systems emphasise the unique, the sense of place and identity (Jordaan, Pureng, & Roos, 2008).

Indigenous Knowledge systems are important in planning generally and in spatial planning in particular, for a number of reasons. Activities and daily relationships that are part of the systems are expressed in the spatial requirements for land allocations, for agriculture, livestock farming, various gender based ceremonies and rituals, burial practices and gendered land usage (KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Commission, 2008a; Odora-Hoopers, 2002). These spatial relationships are deeply rooted in the survival strategies that rural people use to sustain their way of life (Jordaan, Pureng, & Roos, 2008).

There is a correlation between land use and gender. Men in tribal areas are usually hunters and herdsmen and engage in subsidiary activities as fisherman, housing constructors, craftsmen of domestic utensils as well as traders (Sillitoe, Dixon, & Barr, 2005). On the other hand, women are often agriculturists, gatherers, collectors of water and fuel wood seekers (Sillitoe, Dixon, & Barr, 2005). This division of productive activities leads to the division of space within and without the residence (Sillitoe, Dixon, & Barr, 2005). This is because the ecosystems and resources needed for each activity have a distinct location in space. Forests and pastures are assigned to men while open cultivated spaces are for women (Sillitoe, Dixon, & Barr, 2005).

The allocation and administration of land has become a competency of municipalities in countries such as Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa (Shabangu & Khalo, 2008). This has caused many problems since in most cases the role of land allocation in tribal authorities belongs to traditional leaders. In South Africa, for instance, the issue of land allocation has been crucial for many years and is important in understanding the functioning of the Traditional Councils (KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Commission, 2008a). In the days of colonialism, much power of the local government was devolved to Traditional Councils of that time (Khoza, 2002). The issues of land ownership and democracy have always been intricately entwined and thus have not been unproblematic. It is therefore not surprising that various authors hold different views in that respect. Khoza (2002) for instance, maintains that the tribe did not own tribal land, but that the traditional leader held it in trust on behalf of the tribe. It is for this reason that Khoza (2002) sees traditional leadership as the other side of democracy, rather than a different form of democracy.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas A similar idea is advanced by Ntimane (2000) who maintains that traditional structures originally emerged from communities and that they were never imposed on the people, because people had a say in the structure of the government (Ntimane, 2000). While this has been a cultural norm for many tribal communities, most writers have questioned whether or not this benefited communities fully (KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Commission, 2008a). For instance Ntsebeza (2004) illustrates the intricate connection between land ownership and democracy on one hand and traditional leadership and democracy on the other. Ntsebeza (2004) points out that there was a fundamental, conceptual difference between land owned and administered by Traditional Councils and land owned by people for themselves.

He qualifies his stance by admitting that traditional leadership and democracy are antithetical to each other and resuscitating the institutions of traditional leadership is contrary to the democratic tenets of modern governance (Ntsebeza, 2004) According to Ntsebeza (2004), democracy means the right to elect a leader, therefore, the guiding principles of democracy are compromised since these leaders are not elected into positions of power but assume them by virtue of birth and are therefore not accountable to anyone (Ntsebeza, 2004).

4.

Policy Context of LUMS

The discussion in this section considers the policy landscape in selected countries of the world, such as Britain, and Canada in North America, as a basis for discussing the South African landscape. This is crucial for eliciting important lessons and implications for LUMS in rural communities. In Britain, the Town and Country Planning Act of 1909, focussed on public health and housing to govern all development initiatives within a decentralised model including zoning of land use for forestry and agriculture (Davidson, 1992). During mid 1970s in Britain, it was noted that planning procedures had insufficiently considered the future consequences of land use changes in the context of national policies for agriculture, forestry, and urban activities. The involvement in the planning processes of those concerned with agriculture and forestry was insufficient. Policy guidelines were seen as consistent regardless of the issue of agricultural overproduction, which can negatively affect soil quality; areas of prime land were very limited and required protection. In contrast, on-prime land, there was a policy shift in focus towards diversification of the rural economy both on and off farms (Davidson, 1992).

In Canada, different actions have been taken at the provincial level to address the loss of good agricultural land. To this end, the government of Ontario produced a Green Paper on Planning for Agriculture: Food Land Guidelines and the aims were to preserve a better land for agricultural and to ensure the economic feasibility of using the best land for production (Davidson, 1992).

Land policies in Southern Africa had to grapple with customary and statutory dualism in land tenure. Customary land tenure system is often governed by unwritten traditional rules and administered by traditional leaders (Kanyeze, Kondo, & Martens, 2006). Statutory land tenure system is governed by modern law and is supported by documentary evidence such as title deed or lease certificate administered by government (Kanyeze, Kondo, & Martens, 2006). The impetus towards tenure reform varies between countries although there appears to be general recognition that there is a potential link between secure land rights, investment and growth (Kanyeze, Kondo, & Martens, 2006).

South Africa is a constitutional democracy that grapples with certain complexities in addressing demographic and racial profiles. Cultural diversity in relation to LUMS forms part of this conversation and needs to address segregation and disintegration of services to the people. The Constitution Act (No. 108 of 1996) acknowledges our diversity among other things, and values of democracy, human rights and dignity, redress, development et cetera. Given the history of segregation and the imperative to develop a united democratic society, integration of all systems relating to resources utilisation including land use, remains critical in South Africa. The country has been confronted with challenges relating to maintaining a healthy equilibrium between development and land use management (Montgomery, 2000; Peacock, 2002).

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There is evidence of environmental degradation within traditional land tenure system, and this is attributed to failed legislation of the past (Peacock, 2002). As a result, concerns have been raised regarding the future ecological sustainability of the South African Spatial Development Initiative (SDI) programme within KwaZuluNatal. SDI is a strategic intervention by the State whose aim is to integrate and co-ordinate the combined efforts of all government’s agencies with a view to unlocking under-utilised economic potential with specific regions focusing investment on development corridors. This is in line with national growth, empowerment and redistribution (GEAR) policy, and its approach corresponds with the World Bank recommendations in relation to poverty reduction (Montgomery, 2000). One such initiative is the Maputaland (Lubombo SDI) where tourism access roads were constructed across five traditional authority areas with separate traditional land tenure jurisdiction. The main challenge according to Montgomery (2000) was around balancing development and nature conservation. The project’s main criticism has been about uncertain and possible negative impact associated with implementing a project with potential to cause large scale land use changes within areas which are not subject to efficient and effective land use and environment regulations (Montgomery, 2000).

The available pieces of legislation in South Africa make provision for the involvement of traditional leadership but lacks clarity on their specific roles in land use management issues. Land use management systems (LUMS) are established and implemented within a legal framework, which in turn is expected to be responsive to the needs of the country and its people. Some of the pieces of legislation that guide LUMS implementation are listed and briefly discussed below. The Municipal Demarcation Act (No. 27 of 1998), the Municipal Structures Act (No. 117 of 1998) and its amendments, the Land Use Management Bill of 2001, the Municipal Systems Act (No. 32 of 2000) the Municipal Systems Amendment Act (No. 44 of 2003), and the KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Act (No. 06 of 2008). All these pieces of legislation seek to regulate the institutions and structures that are involved in land use management and planning, as well as the practices of the same in South African communities.

Rural areas have been incorporated into municipal wards as part of the wall-to-wall arrangement through the Municipal Demarcation Act (No. 27 of 1998). Such areas have a potential to provide its people with the convenience of a variety of economic and social services and the improvement of quality of life (Lang, 1999). There is a new context within which rural land use finds itself today, and this is characterised by generation of employment opportunities, the encouragement of small businesses, the provision of physical, social and economic infrastructure, community involvement and development, empowerment and education of people and the facilitation of development through lessening bureaucratic controls (Lang, 1999). While land use and development control in South Africa was the responsibility of the provincial administration, the legislation has decentralised this function to local level where greater community involvement and responsibility may occur (Lang, 1999).

However, as years have progressed, the LUMS has been introduced to help and enable municipalities to better manage land. The Municipal Structures Act (No. 117 of 1998) was promulgated to make provision regarding traditional leadership representation and the nature of their participation in the municipal council. However, there were some reservations from traditional leaders due to the fact that their representation was limited to 20% of the total municipal council.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas The Land Use Management Bill (2001) provides a legislative framework for the participation of traditional leadership. These leaders are clearly identified in the Bill as part of the Municipal Land Use Committee consisting of 15 members (Land Use Management Bill of 2001). However, the Bill does not provide clear guidelines on land use. Notwithstanding this, attempts have been made in KwaZulu-Natal to address this challenge by promulgating the KwaZulu-Natal Traditional Leadership and Governance Act (No. 5 of 2005). The Municipal Systems Act makes provision for the involvement of the traditional leadership in the process of drafting, planning, the adoption and the review process of the Integrated Development Plan (IDP). In terms of this Act, every municipality in the Republic of South Africa has to prepare an IDP, which must include a Spatial Development Framework (SDF) component, which in turn has to include guidelines for LUMS (The Planning Initiative Team, 2005). The modalities of implementing this imperative have practical implications at ground level that need to be explored.

The Communal Land Rights Act (No. 11 of 2004) was introduced nationally to address land ownership in communal land irrespective of gender. In these areas women are often treated as minors who cannot hold title deeds on their own. Against this backdrop, Communal Land Rights Act (CLaRA) provides for the entitlement of women in their own right irrespective of their marital status to the same land tenure rights or interests in the land as men do (CLaRA No. 11 of 2004). For the first time in the history of land tenure system in rural areas, women would be able to use their title deeds to secure bank loans to assist them to farm or develop the land.

This, if fully implemented, has the potential to eradicate poverty and ensure the economic emancipation of women. As women are in the majority in communal areas and many are heading their households, having new order rights would be of benefit to the whole of the community (CLaRA No. 11 of 2004).

Traditional leaders in KwaZulu-Natal have remained sceptical about the CLaRA because it makes no mention of their role in the implementation process. This has caused enormous challenges in implementing it regardless of the attempts to provide some clarity. A view exists among some traditional leaders that for systematic development to take place, the land needs to be surveyed to determine its exact size, type and monetary value. Given the enormity of the size of the land under Ingonyama Trust, huge sums of money is needed for such an exercise. A further challenge is that some potential investors have viewed CLaRA with reservations because the land is still communally owned. Some suggestions to adjust some provisions of this legislations appear to be difficult as the term ‘communal’ is at the core of ownership, and yet business and other potential investors prefer something closer to a free hold system. After a series of appeals, the Act has finally been declared unconstitutional and has no place in the statute books of the country. In the meantime, the KwaZuluNatal Planning and Development Act (No. 06 of 2008), stipulates that the municipality may develop any land outside its area or scheme which includes the development of traditional settlements. Notwithstanding these provisions, and despite the fact that some form of land use management occurred in the traditional authorities before LUMS legislations were promulgated, the participation of traditional leaders in the LUMS processes and mechanisms, has not received proper attention in practice.

A critique of the Municipal Systems Act and the KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Act, presented here shows whether or not these pieces of legislation cater for unique circumstances in rural areas in some meaningful way that would enable municipalities to adequately plan in these areas. Section 26 of the Municipal Systems Act (No. 32 of 2000) suggests that an integrated development plan that guides the municipality’s planning must reflect:– -

The municipal council’s vision for the long terms development of the municipality with special emphasis on the municipality’s most critical development and internal transformation needs; An assessment of the existing level of development in the municipality, which must include an identification of communities which do not have access to basic municipal services The council’s development priorities and objectives for its elected term, including its local economic development aims and its internal transformation needs;

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-

The council’s development strategies which must be aligned with any national or provincial sectoral plans and planning requirements binding on the municipality in terms of legislation.... (Department of Provincial Local Government, 2000)

This portrayal of the IDP is ignorant of the community’s perspective because it assumes a certain level of homogeneity of municipal jurisdiction attributing council as being aware of community needs and aspirations.

Even where it speaks of ‘identification of communities which do not have access to basic municipal services’ it uses a panoramic rather than an interactive orientation towards this identification. The Council is then charged with the finalising its development objectives – supposedly being representative of various stakeholders within the municipal community. The prescribed alignment with national and provincial sectoral plans introduces an interesting dynamic as one wonders to what extent prescripts are embodied in this alignment favourable to bottom-up and panoramic planning. This is the context within which a brief examination of the KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Act (KZNPDA) is made.

The KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Act indicates that government intends to promote a uniform planning and development system that treats all citizens of the province equitably; provide a fair and equitable standard of planning and development to everyone in the Province while accommodating diversity such as urban and rural needs. These first assertions of the KZNPDA are obviously conscious of the equality of citizens while also purporting to ‘take care of diversity within some kind of a uniform approach’. It is unclear how this is to be done – not only conceptually, in the manner in which these assertions on ‘uniform approach’ and ‘taking care of diversity’ follow each other but also in the fact that little mention of the urban-rural differentiation is made throughout this law.

Section 5 of the KZNPDA which deals with contents of schemes is explicit about the lead role of the municipality in land use management, especially in regulations or control of schemes (see Section 5 (d) (ii)). Section 5 (d) prescribes that a scheme must specify: (i) (ii)

(iii)

Kinds of land uses and development that are permitted and conditions under which they are permitted; Kinds of land uses and development that may be permitted with the municipality’s permission, the criteria that will guide the municipality in deciding whether to grant its permission, and the conditions which will apply if the municipality grants its permission; Kinds of land uses and development that are not permitted (KZNDCGTA, 2008).

This is problematic, because there is no clear consideration of the two-way process of interaction and learning that needs to happen between the municipality and the communities, especially the rural communities. Even the basic conception of land use from the point of view of communities in line with the indigenous characterisation outlined above is still an issue. In some cases issues related to the changing nature of rural and urban settings need attention. It is not clear that the period of five years, which the municipalities are given to propound the Act, is given in recognition of the need for this two-way learning process and to take into account the diversity that is featured in the Act. However, there is a rational way in which the Act purports to deal with some grey area issues that would otherwise have ‘clouded’ the necessary directive and simple language of policy in the Act. This is through formulation of norms and standards.

In terms of ‘norms and standards’ there will certainly be some uniformity, and at least broad principle, but it is doubtful that diversity embodied will go to an extent of being area-based in terms of land use management.

The main issue of vigilance is whether the formal land use management system (with its Western and previously discriminatory urban-biased orientation) will simply be extended to rural areas. This will be the test of the degree to which community voice is taken seriously in planning. The current reservations in the early promulgation of the KZNPDA are therefore about two issues: the possibility of extension, and the window to forge systems based on two-way learning and thus relevant for diversity of land use conceptions.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas Some sections of the KZNPDA are of greater concern in relation to the indigenous conception of land use that might be subject to “the formal planning and development system” (principle d). Section 5 (e) indicates that a scheme must specify the extent to which land that was being used lawfully for a purpose that does not conform to the scheme may be continued to be used for that purpose and the extent to which buildings or structures on that land may be altered or extended.

What previous lawful use is being referred to here is not clear. Does this mean home burials will cease to happen in homesteads that have done them in accordance with indigenous land use that has not been in accordance with formal laws? Does this have a bearing on agricultural and environmental approvals, and of which era as applicable to land in Ingonyama Trust? Will these issues be clarified during the formulation of ‘norms and standards’? Importantly who ensures that communities’ voices are taken on board in these regulations and policy formulation stages?

In the recent past the KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Commission (KZNPDC) has engaged government stakeholders on issues related to land use management system to assist in the process of implementation especially in rural areas. In 1996 the Commission embarked on a research project on land use management in KwaZulu-Natal that culminated in the LUMS Manual being published in 2001. The Manual has proposed mechanisms for the implementation of a uniform LUMS as applicable to all provinces so as to inform and assist municipalities to achieving their mandates. These include preparing and Implementing LUMS within their areas of jurisdiction, which would assist them in managing their areas in as far as usage, development and land conservation, is concerned. Secondly to put in place a single, uniform, yet flexible LUMS to replace the various fragmented land use control and management systems from previous institutional and legal dispensations. Lastly to meet their legal requirements regarding land use management as set out in the Municipal Systems Act, 2000, and proposed in the Land Use Management Bill, 2001 and the KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Act, 2008.

The Commission undertook a review process in 2004, in order to ascertain whether the LUMS were inclusive of all various important contexts that exist in the planning processes and mechanisms. The LUMS Review provided guidelines for governance and participation accommodating diverse interests of local groups –need to be given the opportunity and tools to participate in the development process –and the conventional procedures should accommodate literacy levels, disability status and geographic access.

5.

Trends, Patterns and Models of Current Practices

a.

Trends in Land Use Management Practice

There is a need for applied social theory to guide settlement practice. New land settlements schemes are some of the most complex of the new agricultural systems, homes, infrastructure, and services and there are also new sets of social relationships and the rapid modification of existing cultural values and norms (Hulme & Turner, 1990). This has been classified as transformation approach to development, which is to create new social and economic institutions, rather than gradually building on existing ones. Within a land settlement scheme a group of people often move to occupy unused or under-utilised rural land, under the guidance of an agency external to the settler community (Hulme & Turner, 1990).Three major land resource bases are land loss, population growth, adverse impact on agricultural practices. Land loss often results from urbanisation and industrialisation as well as, from agriculture and forestry in rural-urban fringe (Davidson, 1992). Population growth has adverse effect on soil and the quality of vegetation. The adverse impact on agricultural practices on soil quality is a global phenomenon (Davidson, 1992).

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The period between 1980s and 1990s was characterised by dramatic changes in the evaluation of land resources to produce data that would be part of land use planning and management (Davidson, 1992). In Britain during the 1980’s, a customer oriented approach was commonly used where geological and soil survey institute have had to finance their activities by contract funding (Davidson, 1992). This had benefits as there was a move to integration in land resource surveys and land evaluation to feed into the process of land use planning and management. There are government schemes that exist which maintain and enhance environment quality in certain areas of Britain which are environment sensitive. To ensure this quality, the State issued grant to local farmers located in such places so that less intensive forms of land cultivation will be applied (Davidson, 1992). According to United Nations (UN), the world population was expected to grow at a rate of 1.6 % between 1985 and 2000 to nearly 6.1 billion with 4.8 billion in the developing countries. During the 1970’s, countries experienced massive food deficit while during the 1980’s food production and security had improved drastically in India and China. In contrast, many African countries had a challenge of feeding their population while their agricultural growth rate was very low (Davidson, 1992).

Similar issues of land loss and degradation continued to be a major concern even in North America and South Africa. In North America, land loss resulted from soil erosion by wind or water, soil structure damage and fertility loss as a result of intensive tillage and soil salinisation, acidification, and pollution (Davidson, 1992). In South Africa, there are persisting perceptions that the type of land ownership influences the extent to which land is preserved and kept in a sustainable manner. The importance of soil and water and the impact of human activity through agriculture, for instance, have been illustrated by Moolman and Lambrecht (1996). These authors claim that in the Western Cape, as it is the case with the rest of South Africa, agricultural activities such as irrigation, is the main consumer of water. While irrigated agriculture is vital for the Western Cape economy, irrigation has created problems of water resources salinisation and in certain places, environmental damage (Moolman & Lambrecht, 1996).

This process causes the release of more soluble salt into a receiving river, and as a result of this, river flowing through irrigation schemes in semi-arid and arid areas pick up salt. Rising water tables is a resultant exacerbating factor which has implications for soil and nature preservation. Current evidence has shown that communal land ownership does not have any causal relationship with land degradation (Montgomery, 2000). Private land ownership per se, does not necessarily provide answers to sustainable land, but that it is the attitudes of people utilising land that require attention and focus. That focus will assist in ensuring that policies that are put in place, and vigorously monitored will maintain the balance between demands for economic development and preservation of high soil quality and prevent degradation (Montgomery, 2000).

LUMS is not implemented successfully in some rural areas, because it is seen as too restrictive and spatial planning has been highly contested by traditional authorities and politicians (Kahn, von Riesen, & Jewel, 2001). Currently, most rural areas have no schemes and cadastral data, because neither izigodi nor individual households are surveyed (Kahn, von Riesen, & Jewel, 2001). The example set by people in Mkhambathini Local Municipality where LUMS was implemented without adhering to restrictions imposed by the scheme point, not only to the existing tensions between legislative legitimacy and indigenous legitimacy of land use, but also to possibilities for partnership and collaboration.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas The recent studies done in KwaZulu-Natal have shown that the LUMS existing in rural areas do involve the municipal officials although the land is administered by traditional leaders and it is imperative for the two structures to find common ground and collaborate in decisions of land use so that development projects would not be interrupted. Such interruption has resulted to a change in original plans and budget for a fish-farming development in Mnini and delays were inevitable due to colliding views between the Traditional Council and municipality (Mbokazi, Ndlovu, Mtshali, & Bhengu, 2009). They have further indicated that indigenous LUMS have been successful in the rural areas like in a case of Empembeni Community of KwaHlabisa local municipality where the culture of cooperation between Traditional Council and the municipality resulted in a space being created for ward councillors to influence decisions though the Inkosi has a final authority in matters related to land use (Mbokazi, Ndlovu, Mtshali, & Bhengu, 2009). What the findings have highlighted is the need for the institutional arrangements that need to be put in place in order to effect a consultative and negotiated land use management planning in areas where leadership is distributed between local government and traditional authorities (KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Commission, 2008). b.

Patterns in Land Use Management Practice: The Evolution of Tools

Patterns in land use management practices examine some indicators of land use and the tools used in planning over the years. Indicators for land use include: percentage of population living within 400 meters of public transport, percentage of employees working within 400 meters of public transport node, average travel to work distance, the ration of jobs to working population by urban sector or settlement, percentage of population within 1500 meters of a ‘district centre’ or major food store, percentage of population within 400 meters of a primary school (Barton, Davis, & Gruise, 1995). Site selection (land allocation) and the formulation of development plan policy should respect the following principles: Conserve land and soil of high fertility, suitable for agriculture, forestry, fuel crops and horticulture or garden usage –but note that areas of low fertility may contain valuable indigenous habitat for biodiversity (Barton, Davis, & Gruise, 1995). Re-use derelict, contaminated, and under-used land –including existing buildings as appropriate –but even if derelict, it may be important as wildlife habitat (Barton, Davis, & Gruise, 1995). Avoid building on unstable land or land with particular poor microclimate and/or aspect (Barton, Davis, & Gruise, 1995). Avoid building on land vulnerable to flooding and/ or coastal erosion, taking into consideration the rise in sea levels owing to global warming (Barton, Davis, & Gruise, 1995). Indicators for land and minerals are listed as: the area of open land given over to development per annum and per decade; the rate of loss of higher grade agricultural land to urban development; the area in hectares of land being farmed organically –as defined by Soil Association; the area in hectares of allotments and small-holdings providing local food sources; the extent of derelict, degraded and contaminated land (Barton, Davis, & Gruise, 1995).

The tools for land use management and planning that have been used to facilitate the above mentioned indicators have evolved over time, and they included a number of techniques and technological considerations to enhance the practice. Among earlier ones were the aerial photography, maps, and computers. More recent ones include various types of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Aerial photography was over the last century to address the need for accurate and objective survey information as a basis for land management in various countries of the world. It provides a valuable tool to record information which is directly observable, and it may be used in conjunction with ground work to obtain information that can only be inferred from evidence which can be seen directly (Keech, 1979). Land use maps can be readily prepared from aerial photography. A computer is yet another tool that is used and it is essentially an electronic devise which receives input, processes it and generates output. There are many current developments which are of interest to land use planners, and these include remote sensing procedures to encompass aerial photography at large and medium scales, and satellite imagery at small scales (Chulvick & Waugh, 1979; Davidson, 1992). The sophistication of these new procedures allows new detailed and almost continuous analysis of land use patterns, with the effects that new developments can be easily recognised (Chulvick & Waugh, 1979).

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In Britain, the methodology used during the 1980’s involved modelling, which refers to a simplification of the real world. This involves the prediction of change and the ability to map the result by the use of an integrated GIS and this has been on a current research frontier in land evaluation. In California, it was argued that by creating sophisticated user communities beyond the reach of less powerful and resource poor citizens, GIS professionals have created limitations to empowerment (Treuhaft, 2006).The use of GIS by community-based organisations active in urban revitalisation efforts has been made possible by the openness of local governments to including all stakeholders as participants and to sharing financial and informational resources necessary for GIS use (Ghose & Elwood, 2003).

A framework for land evaluation includes an increasing application of computer technology and a greater emphasis on shaping the results of the projects to particular situations and planning needs. Davidson (1992) raises concern about technology becoming a main driving force in further developments of land evaluation.

The integrated land evaluation is said to integrate physical suitability or yield alternative societal goals as expressed in priorities such as those given to economic returns, amenity provision and landscape or habitat conservation and this is reviewed to involve combination of land use resources with goals and objectives for land use (Davidson, 1992). An approach that has surfaced is the cost-benefit analysis which requires cost estimation and then comparison of resources to be used and resultant benefits (Davidson, 1992). The rank-based expected value method requires the ranking of the plan objectives, ranking of plans under each objective and the estimation of probabilities of implementation (Davidson, 1992).

Community-Integrated Geographical Information System (CIGIS) recognises Geographical Information System (GIS) as an ‘expert’ system but tests the capacity of the technology in the context of people and communities normally peripheral to spatial decision-making processes and politics (Sillitoe, Dixon, & Barr, 2005). The system also plays a significant role in developmental planning and environment decision making to ensure that not only a top-down approach influences planning decisions, but also grass-root participation is made possible (Vajjhala, 2005). However, for GIS to be used successfully in LUMS sufficient data is required from various relevant sources, which is problematic as many are not open to sharing their information (The Planning Initiative Team, 2005). In this respect, CIGIS would contain not just the cartographic and attribute information traditionally associated with GIS but would be expanded to become a forum around which issues, information, alternative perspectives and decisions revolve (Sillitoe, Dixon, & Barr, 2005).

Also related to CIGIS, is the concept of Public Participatory GIS (PPGIS) and research revealed that PPGIS is made possible through multi-layered collaborations, which includes ensuring cooperation among multiple institutions involved in the process of developmental planning. Local political context shaping PPGIS is composed of multi-layered entities and also includes the role of non-governmental actors engaged in the process of planning, neighbourhood revitalisation, and PPGIS production (Ghose & Elwood, 2003).

Public participation in the GIS map generation ensures that people’s perception, priorities and preferences are incorporated as communities are not homogenous and pictorial view of where communities reside is only a starting point but does not capture the how and why they lived there (Vajjhala, 2005). Challenges in developmental efforts have a variety of oppositions like the concept of Not-In-My-Back-Yard (NIMBY) and this requires detailed data about the characteristics of communities and their residents (Vajjhala, 2005). It would also make provisions for undesirable land uses such as power stations, landfills, and a host of other uses (Cullingworth, 1993). To address this challenge, a process that firstly collects local information secondly integrates it into GIS and then generate participatory information that combines the traditional top-down GIS and bottom-up participatory method, must be applied (Vajjhala, 2005). This linkage provides an effective developmental plan in order to achieve locally-relevant sustainable solutions (Vajjhala, 2005).

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas Planners have used cognitive mapping methods as participatory tools to facilitate human learning as well as to assist in understanding community environment and there has been a scenario where the appropriate use of participatory GIS was achieved where human and finance resources are scarce (Chirowodza, Van Royen, Joseph, Sikotoyi, Richter, & Coates, 2009). The use of Graphical User Interface in technology like cell phones has enabled even the illiterate persons to be able to use computers with minor supervision and this will improve the integration of community participation within GIS in keeping with recent GIS trends (Verplanke, 2004). In Tanzania, the local communities –who have never seen a computer –were able to grasp the basic fundamentals in four hours time, as this was a major challenge in implementing CIGIS. The experiences in India and Senegal of implementing CIGIS highlighted accountability (transparency and visibility of decision), participation (disadvantaged men and women, less articulate) respect for local knowledge and indigenous spatial knowledge (explicit use of local people’s knowledge of spatial boundaries, resource conditions, indigenous zoning principles), equity (this has not been achieved ) and competency (the capacity to acquire and understand and use the actual information that has real meaning for the local people) as important issues to be considered to achieve an effective GIS for proper spatial planning tools (Verplanke, 2004). c.

Land Use Management Models

The analysis of a number of toolkits in various countries including selected provinces in South Africa indicates that a number of models are currently being used in land use planning and management. The pillars of the models are the use of technology to enhance data accuracy, engaging communities to collect their local culture towards developing community visions, enhancing human resources capacity in municipalities to ensure quality land use planning, implementation strategies, as well as monitoring and evaluation of tools used in the process. i.

Use of Technology to Enhance Data Accuracy and Incorporate Local Knowledge in land use planning The use of technology, such as computer software and other information systems, has been demonstrated in Australian and South African toolkits. The use of these supportive devises is done differently in these contexts, depending on the social, political, and cultural factors that characterise them.

In Australia, their best practice in land use planning is the use of integrated information management solution which claims to combine leadership, people, technology, applications and data into a framework. Such a framework seeks to ensure that tools, appropriate procedures and standards, are in place. This integrated system seeks to maintain and transform data into useful information products that support operations and the decision making process (Australian Local Government Asssociation (ALGA) and Spatial Information Council, 2002). The approach of municipalities in applying standards for data is guided by the following: Increased data sharing, improved data consistency, increased data integration and interoperability, better understanding of data, improved documentation of information resources, improved control over data updating activities and development of new versions, of datasets, and improved data security (Australian Local Government Asssociation (ALGA) and Spatial Information Council, 2002).

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Geographic Information Systems (GIS) maps may be used as an essential tool in the process. In South Africa not all municipalities have access to Geographic Information Systems (GIS), but for those that do, it is imperative that the Spatial Development Framework is linked to the municipality’s GIS. This means that the Spatial Development Concept must be captured digitally on the GIS so that the development proposals for a particular area or particular parcel of land can be viewed together with other spatial data such as cadastral information, position of bulk engineering infrastructure, land ownership, land values et cetera. The land use management guidelines and conditions must be captured in attribute tables so that information on the development conditions pertaining to a particular area or parcel of land can be viewed as part of the GIS system (Mpumalanga Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, 2010). Such a GIS based SDF will have tremendous value in land use planning and management in terms of ensuring the availability of information for decision makers; coordination of departmental planning; analysis of growth and development trends; monitoring of the sectoral compliance with the SDF; Land Use Management; and client service (Mpumalanga Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, 2010).

One of the latest international trends on GIS is the move towards Community-Integrated Geographic Information System that values local knowledge in the generation of geo-spatial data. This trend in GIS ensures that systems provide a more effective platform for community dialogue and even debates to ensure the incorporation of both expert knowledge and the human experience and/or local perspective about the spatial plans community (Elmes, Dougherty, Challig, Karigomba, McCusker, & Weiner, 2005) ii.

Engaging Community to Collect their Local Culture Information and develop a community vision in land use planning Community engagement in Australia is limited to communicating tools to a wider communities and ensuring that the tool is adopted by the user community, while vested upon the managers. This is typical of a top-down approach to community engagement, and therefore limited. Canada, the United States of America (USA) and South Africa present different examples of how best local communities can be involved as a way of ensuring a participatory and democratic land use planning and management.

In Canada, a Land Use Planning Success Framework allows for the participatory identification of a broad vision for a people-centred land use planning. In identifying broad vision there are two main actions, i.e. pre-planning and planning (Ecotrust Canada, 2009). Pre-planning action entails forming planning teams, describing purpose and scope of the plan, timeline and work plan, communications strategy, engaging and surveying community, collecting local cultural knowledge and identifying information gaps (Ecotrust Canada, 2009). Planning entails formulation of vision, values and guiding principles of the plan, formulations of goals, objective and strategies, technical assessments, policies, land use designations and a formal adoption of the plan (Ecotrust Canada, 2009).

The strength of this framework is in its propensity to ensure that local knowledge and practice are carefully considered to establish a kind of land use planning that is responsive to the needs of the people.

In the United States of America one crucial step in land use planning process is developing a sound community vision that captures the needs of the people in a community. The visioning process usually involves five to six steering committee meetings with representatives of all major stakeholders in the communities, and there should be at least two to three public meetings, over a period of two to three months (www.sustainablepittsburg.org). In these meeting people must engage on forwardplanning processes.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas In South Africa situational analysis is done as a way of engaging a local community to establish their needs. This entails a careful analysis of people’s demand and satisfaction, public sector infrastructure, natural assets, tourism industry inventory, economic impact, and community tourism (Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, 2009). The planning programme must also include a consultation plan, identifying key stakeholders, the number and nature of meetings to be held with external stakeholders and a communication plan whereby external stakeholders will be informed of the process and the dates of meetings (Mpumalanga Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, 2010). All stakeholders must have the opportunity to contribute to the development of the spatial development concept; and all stakeholders can contribute to the development of the capital investment framework (Mpumalanga Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, 2010) iii.

Enhancing Human Resource Development in Municipalities to Ensure Quality Land Use Planning Among others, the purpose of a land use management toolkit is to assist municipal officials and interested citizens to guide the growth and development of their communities through the preparation and implementation of a comprehensive plan. Included in land use planning toolkits used in South Africa and in the United States of America, is the acknowledgement that some municipalities have limited capacity to develop their land use planning and management tools.

In the USA, this is addressed by stipulating in their toolkit guidelines that finance must be secured for expertise in land use management, especially for smaller municipalities that often lack necessary specialists in this regard. Further stipulations are made that once this is done, it is important to ensure that the human resource to carry out the land use planning process is available. During this process, municipalities are urged to proceed with extreme caution not to just turn over the work to consultants, but to have effective monitoring mechanisms that would ensure quality of work procured as well as to ensure absolute municipal ownership thereof (www.sustainablepittsburg.org).

In South Africa capacity building is concerned with identifying and using various approaches to enhancing people’s abilities to participate in planning (Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, 2009). This is underpinned by the policy intensions that seek to democratise land use planning and management practice.

iv.

Implementation Strategies Used Across Different Countries Toolkits that seek to guide land use planning in various countries such as Canada, USA, and in two provinces –Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal –in South Africa provide a number of useful implementation strategies depending on the circumstances in their respective contexts.

In Canada, a major step in articulating a detailed vision is the implementation of the plan. This includes a strong emphasis on the actual creation of an action plan, celebrating that plan, as well as integrating the plan into the community, and economic development thereof (Ecotrust Canada, 2009). It is suggested that the process of identifying and articulating the vision should not be more than eighteen months, while achieving broad vision can take a number of years depending on the intensity of the plan (Ecotrust Canada, 2009).

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The implementation of land use planning in the USA includes a series of activities that must be consistent with the comprehensive plan. These are creating a zoning ordinance, creating a subdivision and land development, obtaining a team with professional planning training and experience to carry out duties such as: administering the plan and implementing ordinances; reviewing development applications and developing recommendations for the planning commission and governing body, creating detailed plans for sub-districts, and refining the plan’s functional elements such as housing or transportation, all of which are part of land use planning and management (www.sustainablepittsburg.org).

A South African toolkit provides guidelines for making the Spatial Development Framework in Mpumalanga province municipalities work effectively. It seeks to achieve two main goals, i.e. entrenching the importance of the SDF amongst role-players; and elevating the role and function of the SDF in municipalities (Mpumalanga Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, 2010).

In KwaZulu-Natal, municipalities have been urged to consider specific criteria in development and allocation of land for various uses. These are the written motivation for development; the physical and natural qualities of the site; the layout of the development; analysis of existing developments, a clear articulation of development and mineral rights, understanding local customs and local knowledge within economic, social, and environmental concerns; access to engineering services, public facilities and the historical effects of racially discriminatory legislation on land ownership, and so on (Berrisford, 2005).

There are traditional settlements in KZN, which need proper regulation in terms of land use planning and management, and guidelines to do this. These need to regulate that the normal process of obtaining permission must be obtained from the Induna, Amakhosi and Ingonyama Trust Board, except for specific uses on communally held land. The Ingonyama Trust shall not provide a lease or permission to occupy the land without the written consent of the municipalities in terms of their schemes. Uses on communally held land include umuzi; tuck shop occupying less than 25m²; home business that employ less than four people and which do not have negative impact on neighbours; cultivation of communal gardens; crèches; grazing; harvesting of thatching grass and cultivation and harvesting of medical plants. The articulation of these guidelines, however, indicates that power dynamics between municipalities and traditional leadership exists and their considerations are influenced by various ideologies.

A recent South African toolkit suggests that strategic planning must involve local authority planning, working with relevant industry and infrastructure planning. The implementation phase uses models and local partnerships; project design, appraisal and development; project evaluation; and event development, funding, and evaluation (Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, 2009). v.

Monitoring and Evaluation of Land Use Planning Tools Mechanism for monitoring and evaluation of land use planning are crucial factors in effective land use planning and management. Thus they have been part of municipal mandate in a number of contexts, such as Australia, Canada, and South Africa, though these are regulated differently.

In Australia, the personnel placed to oversee the developments of all guidelines are the local government managers and they play a specific monitoring role to ensure the appropriateness of the database (Australian Local Government Asssociation (ALGA) and Spatial Information Council, 2002).

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas Achieving the broad vision on land use planning and management in Canada two actions are required, i.e. monitoring and adaptation. Monitoring change includes assessing the impact of, and enforcing, the plan. Adaptation requires reflecting on implementation strategy and revising land use planning accordingly, and paying consideration to new information, new science, and new human needs as identified in the process (Ecotrust Canada, 2009).

During the process of monitoring the performance of plans in South Africa, activities include using performance indicators and measurements to assessing the successes and achievements of the planning process (Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, 2009). In addition, it is recommended that once a municipality has developed its spatial development concept, it must evaluate it against the spatial objectives and spatial strategies that were formulated previously (Mpumalanga Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, 2010).

6.

A Conundrum in Policy and Practice

This section demonstrates tensions, disjuncture, gaps, silences and vagueness in policy and practice that have resulted in a conundrum in South African policy landscape. Such a conundrum attests to a reality of practice on the ground that does not match policy intent at various spheres of government. Although local government’s role in land use planning and development management has been recognised in the Constitution and other pieces of legislation, there are still more difficult questions to answer. For instance: how does the municipality’s authority regarding municipal planning compare to that of national and or provincial government? (de Visser & Singiza, 2010). This question takes another dimension when considered in the context of rural communities where issues of land use planning have to deal with the authority of traditional leaders, and indigenous ways of using land. A series of significant events and processes have occurred and these raise further questions about who is responsible for what part of land use planning and development management.

These events include a number of court cases held in the High Court about issues that appear to undermine local planning (de Visser & Singiza, 2010; Ntlizinywana, 2010). The case of Swartland Municipality versus Elsana Quarry mining company is evidence of undermining local municipality planning, disjuncture in policy provisions (de Visser & Singiza, 2010).

The municipality on one hand wanted the property bought by Elsana Quarry to be rezoned from agricultural to industrial land before any mining activity could commence. Elsana Quarry on the other hand maintained that the municipality had no competence to regulate land use for mining purposes. The municipality was doing this within its mandate to coordinate and harmonise the use of land to benefit the local citizens (de Visser & Singiza, 2010). After weighing the arguments from both parties and considering policy in context, the High Court resolved that no mining operations should take place until the property was rezoned from agricultural to industrial land (de Visser & Singiza, 2010). While this resolution points to the importance of reading each policy provision in relation to others, the challenge of vagueness in policy on land use planning and management still remains.

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An example of gap in policy is the fact that there is still no Land Use Management Act, whereas in the interim, land use planning processes need to occur and be properly managed. For instance in 2008 Land Use Management Bill was submitted to Parliament after years of protracted debates, but was withdrawn after a series of public hearing processes (de Visser & Singiza, 2010). Since then there has been no evidence of progress in terms of this Bill becoming an Act of Parliament. On the same vein, previous pieces of legislation that were used to regulate and control land use issues are not able to address all current land use management issues.

Notwithstanding the absence of national legislative framework on land use, a view persists that municipalities, provinces and the courts can no longer wait for a national Land Use Management Act to deliver the country from the embarrassing reality that in 2010, land use planning in South Africa is still done in terms of apartheid legislation (de Visser & Singiza, 2010).

It is against this backdrop that KwaZulu-Natal has produced its Planning and Development Act (KZNPDA). The KZNPDA emphasises one single scheme of the entire municipality but institutional arrangements and seasonal land uses in rural areas have not been adequately provided for and clarified. The Act is silent on the issue of traditional leadership roles in planning. As a result, in rural communities tensions between municipalities and traditional leaders on land use planning have been observed (Mbokazi, Ndlovu, Mtshali, & Bhengu, 2009; KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Commission, 2008). This is evidenced by poor service delivery, uneven appreciation of the role and needs of local government –poor intergovernmental cooperation and onerous reporting and compliance, weak support and oversight of local government –poor provincial capacity to support and monitor, and an inadequate range of strategic coalition and systems to foster sustainable support mechanisms, and differentiation between municipalities not being adequately defined or addressed –an asymmetry that needs policies to address the fact that ‘one size does not fit all’ (Hughes, 2010).

This happens despite the current move towards shared services between district and local municipalities.

Providing shared services is an attempt by local government to redeploy planning expertise from district levels to local municipality levels to assist those municipalities that lack these expertises. However, this increases workloads, which leads to unbalanced support to local municipalities, due to long distances from central municipal levels. Such resultant challenges render the provision of shared services ineffective at best. Complementary to the limitations of shared services, there is still over-reliance on consultants by most municipalities, because they do not have capacity to prepare land use planning and management tools required by law. A further challenge to this is poor capacity for them to monitor quality assurance of the tools being prepared by consultants.

Political interference in municipal administration has been raised as another point of tension in policy and practice. The report on the state of African local government clearly identifies interference by political parties as a cause of the dysfunctionality and instability of municipalities. It is noted that political parties are undermining the integrity and functioning of municipal councils through inappropriate interference in councils and administrative processes (Ayaele, 2010). Therefore, it has been admitted that the appointment of political party office bearers to municipal administration is by far the worst kind of political interference in municipal affairs (Ayaele, 2010). Mandeni Local Municipality is currently experiencing community unrest that led to the burning down of government offices as a result of this reality. Subsequently, the community has chased out municipal officials during IDP community meetings, because their demands of “firing” the mayor, the municipal manager, and a PR officer, had not been met by the municipality.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas The Guidelines that have been developed by the KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Commission to assist relevant stakeholders to enhance their land use planning and development responsibilities appear to have been poorly disseminated. After a research project report and a guiding document has been finalised, two copies are sent to each municipality and conferences are organised to discuss findings and guidelines further as a way of disseminating information. These documents have valuable information on understanding and dealing with land in traditional council areas, but there is no monitoring mechanism in place to assess how these are used by municipalities. Most municipalities complain about having limited finances to send their staff to conferences.

7.

Conclusions on the Literature

The literature review has raised a number of issues pertinent to understanding LUMS in different countries and contexts. Some of these issues relate to the need to maintain equilibrium between development requirements relating to people and that of nature conservation. The two closely related issues are critical as both are necessary. The lack of a sociological perspective in the planning processes has been highlighted and attributed as a cause of repeated failures that have plagued development programmes in many countries. The document highlights some ways in which this can be addressed. For instance, dealing with land issues in rural areas demands an in-depth understanding of power dynamics and institutions that exist therein and these were largely ignored in previous land use planning policy and practice agenda. The need to obtain accurate data is critical for ensuring that land use planning is productive and can prevent potential harmful consequences as a result of human activity. However, in the process of acquiring accurate data, the danger has been that certain experts tend to underestimate the importance of consultation and participation of local people who are affected by proposed land use changes that may be undertaken from time to time.

Within the context of South Africa and KwaZulu-Natal in particular, people participation in land use is important in many ways. We have seen that the responsibility for LUMS rests with the municipality. At the same time, we have noted that traditional leadership has always been involved in the LUMS processes in their own way.

The South African Constitution sees traditional leaders as custodians of culture and indigenous knowledge systems –the wealth of local knowledge that people in a particular area possess and share. Local knowledge itself is shaped by a range of factors beyond culture to include socio-political, and land use planning must be sensitive to this reality. This wealth of knowledge is important for LUMS because activities and daily relationships that are part of the systems are expressed in the spatial requirements for land allocations for agriculture, livestock farming, various gender based ceremonies and rituals, burial practices and gendered land usage.

Furthermore, legislative framework has recognised the traditional leadership roles in LUMS even though precise guidelines for their collaboration with municipalities have not been provided.

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Policy landscape in South Africa has been seen as progressive, but it presents a conundrum that sustains a situation where practice does not reflect policy intent. There are tensions, disjuncture, gaps, silences and vagueness in policy and practice, which exacerbate this conundrum. For instance, local government’s land use management competence is undermined, because of disjuncture in policy and practice, and the case of Swartland Municipality versus Elsan Quarry mining company is evidence of this. In the absence of national legislative framework on land use, KwaZulu-Natal Province made drastic progress and produced its Planning and Development Act. This Act emphasises one single scheme for the entire municipality without clearly providing for institutional arrangements and some seasonal land uses. Notwithstanding all the above, lessons have been learnt regarding trends and patterns of current practices from international to local contexts. An analysis of toolkits from Australia, Canada, United States of America, and South Africa was done in order to highlight lessons for land use planning and management that can be used in KwaZulu-Natal. These toolkits indicated that land use planning and management in various countries has been characterised by use of technology to enhance data accuracy, engaging community to collecting their local culture and developing a community vision, various implementation strategies, as well as monitoring and evaluation mechanisms.

These models provide useful considerations towards the development of a relevant and comprehensive toolkit to assist municipalities in carrying out their respective spatial planning mandates. The Australian toolkit prioritises data accuracy over the involvement of people at grassroots levels in planning processes, and is therefore a good example of what not to do in regulating land use planning in rural communities. The experiences of Canada, the United States of America, and South Africa emphasise the significance of involving affected people in LUMS processes.

Early engagements with different informants and observations in various municipalities, as well as the analysis of existing toolkits in various contexts, suggest that poor municipal land use planning and management is linked to the a number of factors. These are various types of land tenure systems, weak institutional linkages, as well as poor capacity of municipalities to prepare, tools required to implement and monitor land use planning and management in a participatory and democratic manner. A good toolkit must provide some guidelines on the use of technology to enhance data accuracy useful for land use planning, engaging communities in participatory dialogue about local culture towards developing a sound community vision, as well as enhancing human resource capacity of municipal officials to prepare, implement, monitor and evaluate land use planning tools.

These factors will be carefully considered and included in the toolkit that this project is developing to assist municipalities in KwaZulu-Natal in dealing with land use planning and management in rural communities. This study provides a combination of alternative models for land use planning and management that are both compliant and challenging to policy provisions.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas CHAPTER 3: FINDINGS 1.

Introduction

This chapter outlines the findings of the study. These findings are discussed in terms of the provisioning of land use management systems (LUMS) at government levels, and the experience thereof at local –district and local municipal –levels. The information on provincial provisioning of LUMS was gathered from government officials and members of civil society, as well as document analysis. At local levels, the information on land use planning and management was gathered from relevant stakeholders and is examined in three rural communities, i.e. Jozini, Nkandla, and Mandeni. These communities are presented in terms of their profiles in order to outline the context of land use planning and management, the use of policy provision and technology as well as institutional linkages and community participation in facilitating LUMS. The conclusions will be drawn in relation to the implications of our findings in terms of policy and practice, and then recommendations for change are provided.

2.

Provisioning of LUMS at Government Levels

The discussion on provisioning includes some analysis of whether or not LUMS are responsive to dealing with land issues in rural areas by looking at the existing guidelines and how useful they are in ensuring this.

The analysis also includes the use of technology in land use planning and management as articulated by the informants in government departments and parastatals, as well as district municipalities. In discussing the use of technology, the databases and the quality of data available in the form of GIS within these contexts and how this is shared across various stakeholders involved in land use management systems, are considered. a.

Provincial Guidelines on LUMS and their Effectiveness The KwaZulu-Natal Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (KZNCOGTA) established guidelines in 2006 on how LUMS should be prepared within a municipality. Subsequently, guiding criteria on how LUMS documents are assessed were developed and implemented. The content analysis of these guidelines reveals that the process of preparing a LUMS must include the following components: • • • • • • •

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Institutional capacity for a municipality to prepare LUMS must be determined The status quo within the municipality in terms of land tenure, availability and usability of land, as well as the level of community consultation required, must be determined.

To determine the exact type of land use scheme needed in the municipality through proper agreements with all relevant parties.

To embark in the actual preparation of the schemes in accordance with appropriate legislation and addressing information gaps.

Once the schemes are prepared they must be circulated for public comments, and be amended according to comments received before submitted to the provincial department for approval Proper considerations must also be made for land in traditional council areas to ensure that land use management is supportive of traditions that exist in these areas.

Understanding of benefits of LUMS that include providing a greater variety of management mechanisms that could improve the management of traditional areas is necessary.

While these guidelines appear to be clear enough, they provide insufficient guide for municipalities to deal with rural areas. As a result, they have been used differently by municipalities and LUMS documents produced have different level of quality, relevance and usability. Most municipalities rely on consultants to prepare these documents often with limited ability to provide quality assurance in the process. The additional problem of relying heavily on consultants was that municipalities were unable to provide scheme maps directly when requested to do so by the COGTA, but referred the Department to the consultants.

In addition to the above guidelines COGTA has produced a document on the Provincial Spatial Planning Guideline 7: Communication and Knowledge Transfer Processes in Spatial Planning, which acknowledges the limitations in policy and training of planners to deal adequately with rural communities (KZNCOGTA, 2009). While this is a useful document to facilitate community participation at municipal level, it overlooks the role of traditional leaders and their councils in the process and there is a disjuncture between the Open Learning Process –which is top-down and trying to breathe life to top-down policy regulations. As a result there is still much room for improvement in order to allow two-way knowledge transfer, clearly outlining the role of traditional leaders –who are custodian of culture according to the Constitution.

A two-way kind of knowledge transfer would create opportunities for both municipalities and local communities to learn from one another thus ensuring mutual learning. Other theorists talk about a concept of ignorance reduction rather than knowledge production (Gough, 2001), and that can be useful in strengthening the discourse of knowledge transfer. Ignorance reduction in this process must happen both in planning experts and in community members involved for this to work. Institutional linkages in communication and knowledge transfer are crucial, and are an obvious consideration for COGTA, responsible for both local government and traditional affairs of the country.

COGTA also identified problems in the ways in which LUMS documents sent to the Department for approval were GIS-compliant. It was found that maps had arbitrary scale, illegible, confusing and incomplete legends, as well as inadequate cross-references of maps in the scheme text. Those municipalities that have managed to prepare their schemes sufficiently are also challenged by the level at which these schemes are responsive to the circumstances in rural areas.

Another very important document was produced by the Department of Co-Operative Governance and Traditional Affairs in 2008 on the Community Participation Framework, which defines community participation within the framework of deepening democracy and power-sharing (KZNCOGTA, 2008). This is a breakthrough in government thinking about democratising social processes, but a kind of deficit attitude towards understanding particularly the rural communities is evident in the document and permeates the underlying ideologies shared broadly by municipal officials. This document depicts rural communities as lacking assertiveness, political culture and level of literacy to engage the government. They are not seen as experts in culture and their indigenous knowledge relevant to make them contribute meaningfully to government processes. This thinking is the reason why platforms being created within municipalities for meaningful participation remain erratic, uneven and not deepening democracy at all.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas b.

The Responsiveness of LUMS to Traditional Council Lands in KZN Responsiveness can have myriads of meanings depending on context and purpose, but the Encarta Dictionary defines it as ‘reacting quickly, strongly or favourably to something, especially a suggestion or a proposal’. Central features of responsiveness include receptiveness, openness, reaction, sensitivity and awareness. This means that the tools for land use planning and management in rural areas must be in proper conversation with culture and indigenous knowledge systems. While this may translate to total compliance, a room for negotiations towards a kind of transformation that is in the best interest of the people must be created.

All participating stakeholders were asked to comment on the responsiveness of LUMS in dealing with land under traditional authorities, issues of fragile and threatened ecosystem, and tourism. They were also asked to discuss the extent to which the existing systems, procedures and technical support were useful for spatial planning and land allocation in rural areas and the associated problems. In addition to these, informants made some recommendations on how the situation in rural areas may be improved to better plan and manage land.

The Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR) indicated that most Town Planning Schemes in the province did not cover traditional authority lands, and that there was absence of tools to do this in rural areas in the context of the KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Act of 2008 only coming into effect in May 2010. According to the DRDLR, LUMS are land controls that are used to manage land development with respect to all land uses, and as such, are able to cater for areas of economic activity. However, the current systems for spatial planning and land allocation are seen as having fairly limited control procedures. The DRDLR sees the involvement of rural communities in facilitating LUMS as only possible if these communities were informed and understand the value of LUMS. In this way they may assist municipalities to manage such systems.

The Municipal Demarcation Board uses a top-down approach to facilitate demarcations in municipalities, and this has precipitated some tensions relating to land planning and management. In terms of this approach, a formula is provided by the MEC responsible for local government, implemented by specialists, and thereafter hearings are conducted with the affected communities. The formula is non-negotiable and is so powerful that even the suggestions raised during hearings are only entertained if they are in line with the formula. The manner in which these hearings are conducted raises questions about motive and value of community participation in that process. Possibilities for influencing policy processes are undermined to a point where people at grassroots level lose confidence in the process and its bona fides. The conversation between culture and government intentions in terms of demarcation is weak in this sense and has resulted in government disturbing the traditional wards in rural areas, leaving unhappiness among the rural citizenry. This means that the current demarcations is not responsive to rural areas as they are subjected to the same formula regardless of the unique cultural needs of these communities.

The selected districts responded to the question on the responsiveness of LUMS in rural areas by highlighting a number of issues. Among others, it was that LUMS deals with rural areas in an incomplete manner, because too much focus has been given to urban areas. Some municipalities were still drafting relevant strategic documents to enable them to deal properly with rural areas. Community participation in facilitating LUMS was seen by some district municipalities as sufficient in terms of establishing Ward Committees. However, it was noted that more room for improvement existed in terms of scheduling workshops, building capacity of people to participate, and listening to people’s needs, as well as finding innovative and strategic ways of responding to these.

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There was a link between the life worlds of people working directly with LUMS and the responsiveness of LUMS. Using Wenger’s community of practice theory about people negotiating their identities in various contexts, it is clear that GIS and planning specialists at departmental and municipal levels were somewhat too technical and less social in dealing with LUMS. Discussions with planners reveal that those planners who understood the dynamics in traditional leadership system were optimistic about possibilities of collaboration regarding successful LUMS implementation. These had better approach to community involvement and participation than those who had limited understanding of circumstances in traditional communities.

A recommendation can be made that getting traditional leaders fully involved and their roles identified in the process, the formulation and implementation of land use planning and management tools are more likely to succeed in rural areas. However, extreme caution needs to be exercised by all stakeholders involved to remain objective and to contribute meaningfully in the process. A toolkit has been drafted to guide how this can be achieved.

Culture is negotiated and therefore can inform the process of LUMS in rural areas. Unfortunately current mechanisms driving community participation are not effective in addressing issues of culture, customs, and beliefs that characterise the life worlds of people in rural areas. If this is done properly, control measures and mechanism thereof may draw from socio-cultural factors, combining and learning from all relevant perspectives at play to formulate and implement LUMS. This will ensure that LUMS is responsive to the socio-cultural contexts of communities being served. Once a community dialogue is done towards constructing a vision for LUMS, outcomes of the dialogues must inform the geo-referencing of land allocated for various uses, such that GIS is informed by culture.

There are a number of unique land uses that exist in rural areas that have been and are still being neglected in planning regulations. These are amakhaphelo (winter grazing land), amadlelo (summer grazing land), izinkambu (fenced all seasons grazing) amasimu (vegetable fields), izishozi (danger zones frequented by thunder storms), amahlathi emvelo (indigenous forests), and izigcawu (open spaces for cultural festivities), which must be properly regulated and protected from unnecessary rezoning. A set of possible scheme clauses have been formulated as part of this project to guide how this can be achieved.

Seasonal land uses in each municipality must also be properly identified through effective community dialogues, be accurately geo-referenced through GIS and properly mapped, and incorporated into a municipality’s IDP, SDF and LUMS tools, in the language of the community. These tools must also be made available to all stakeholders involved in land use planning and management in rural communities. This is crucial to ensure that these tools are responsive to the community, sustainable and are easily accessed by people at various level of literacy within wall-to-wall municipal arrangements. c.

Availability and use of Technology in LUMS Technological use in LUMS is examined here in the context of the availability and use of GIS at provincial and local levels, and ways in which this is relevant for rural areas. To determine the availability and use of GIS data in LUMS, interviews were conducted with informants at various levels. These included the Departments of Rural Development and Land Reform, Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Surveyor General, Statistics South Africa, Municipal Demarcation Board, KZN Wild Life and all eleven district municipalities. However, not all these stakeholders responded to our invitation to participate in the study. The districts that responded include UThukela, Sisonke, Zululand, eThekwini, Amajuba, Ugu and UMkhanyakude. While these stakeholders highlighted the availability and use of GIS data at their disposal and the extent to which it incorporates rural areas, they also commented on the quality of spatial data contained therein.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas The Office of the Surveyor General in KwaZulu-Natal is the custodian of all cadastral information surveyed for the province, and this is captured by their Spatial Mapping Division. Though this division captures all the recently surveyed and approved cadastral parcels to create a continuous spatial map, which is updated daily for the province, their spatial map does not include any information on Deeds Registry and LUMS. The new approved surveys are added 20 days after approval. A spatial dump of the whole province is done once a month and is always available from the 7th day of the new month in shapefile format. This data is available at no charge for the actual monthly dataset, but the media, postage and processing time is charged for. The official at the Surveyor General’s Office indicated that the accuracy of the survey data is 0.3m and they strive for a 95% correctness of information.

The Department of Rural Development and Land Reform’s Chief Directorate of Spatial Planning has undertaken two projects on Rural Settlements towards establishing, among other things rural GIS data.

One project is an update of the initial work done by the Department, while the other project examines urban edges and urban growth patterns. The latter, completed in July 2009, consolidates a GIS data from various government departments in KwaZulu-Natal. A DVD has been produced and is readily available free of charge, both on AccuGlobe for non-GIS practitioners and the shapefiles for GIS practitioners. The data on rural settlement provides information on settlements location, services provided to those settlements and land ownership. Urban Edges data provides information on the urban to peri-urban areas of all the towns in KZN, both large and small. The Spatial Planning Chief Directorate also maps all the rural land reform projects, including both land restitution (land claims) and land redistribution projects, and these are updated weekly. Data generated through Land Reform projects shows where beneficiaries may need land services. All data has a level of accuracy on the Metadata. As such, all these projects can be of benefit to the study of LUMS. However, this DVD is not accessible through Windows 7 and Vista, and as such has limited accessibility despite its being available for free.

The Municipal Demarcation Board hosts rural data in terms of farm cadastral, DWAF Communities, secondary roads, satellite imagery, rivers, traditional authorities, schools, hospitals 2001, Sub-place 2001, and Enumerator Areas (EA’s) that cover wall-to-wall municipalities. The cadastral is dated 2009, imagery is dated 2008, while other data is older and dated between 2000 and 2006. According to the official in the Board, the usefulness of data is limited, because most of them are outdated and detailed studies are yet to be conducted to update these. Only information on municipal and ward boundaries can be made available to consultants. Statistics South Africa has rural data contained as an attribute in their Enumerator Areas dataset dated 2001 and there is dwelling frame data that is dated 2005 and is available for selected villages and municipalities in the country. Imagery dated 2007 is also flown and processed for certain areas, and it has limited coverage. Statistics South Africa is busy preparing for Census 2010, while updating the current dataset, which will be released in 2011. The data is available in shapefile format and can be made available to anyone who needs it on request. The accuracy of data is sub meter accurate where information was geo-referenced, but other information is 3-5m and some are digitised from aerial or satellite imagery.

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The contribution of districts to this conversation on LUMS ranges from providing commentary on the availability of rural GIS data to the unavailability thereof. For instance, in eThekwini Metro, land use zoning data was available for a wall-to-wall coverage, but it was only 80% up to date. There is a need for cadastral data maps that cover Ingonyama Trust lands. The data was readily available in shapefile format. In UThukela District Municipality most of the data was not up to date, thus its quality and usefulness was questionable. Besides the standard cadastral traditional authorities and municipal boundaries data, uThukela has settlement footprints dated 1996; household counts data conducted by ESKOM in 2001; and Census Sub Place 2001 data provided by STATSSA; agricultural potential; environmental data including wetlands, conservation areas, protected and unprotected land cover; contours (20m); health facilities; electricity networks (ESKOM); soil details; sanitation projects; community halls and crèches; land reform projects (DLA); Tourism (KZN Tourism); water schemes, pipelines (where available); Hydro Census (2001); Ortho photos (2000, 2007). This data covered all five local municipalities within the District, but it was only updated when required, as budget allowed or when the various departments updated theirs. While some data such as the settlement footprints was much older (1996), cadastral data was more recent.

In Sisonke District, rural GIS data provides information about rural settlement, farm boundaries for the whole district, and it was available in shapefile format dated 2009. In Ugu District, the GIS data available covered only 80% of rural infrastructure within the municipality. Most data was updated in 2006/7, but some processes of further updating these were ongoing. Such data can be very useful, despite the limitations, and was accessibly within specified copyright conditions. Data remains the property of this municipality and any commercial re-distribution is prohibited. There was some level of accuracy of data even though it was being updated. In the district community participation in facilitating LUMS was done through ward committees and other formal structures.

In Zululand District Municipality, the GIS data covered demographics, households, water related (boreholes, jojo tanks, settlements with access to water), water regional schemes, schools, hospitals, roads, images, etc, but it covered only 95% of the district. The data available was dated 2005, and more recent versions of data were 2007 and 2009. To access this data, a request form was filled before the data would be made available to the applicant. The officials claimed that this data was accurate, though it did not deal with LUMS per se. In Amajuba District Municipality the official indicated that all rural areas were covered in terms of cadastral layouts, though certain datasets such as water infrastructural information still needed to be updated. Despite this, the data covered the entire municipality and had been beneficial to the process of establishing LUMS in terms of identifying different land uses. It was readily available on request.

In UMkhanyakude, GIS data on rural areas included all tribal authorities, place names and settlements of all rural areas within the district. There was also cadastral data, aerial photograph dated 2008, topographical sheets etc. The data covered the whole district and the data update varied between 2006 till recent. The officials indicated that the data was being used in preparing rural schemes. All this data could be available on request to researchers as well as municipalities.

The experience of the departments and districts in terms of GIS is that data at the disposal of municipalities was available and located at various points. There were various levels of data accuracy, accessibility and usability. Municipalities can access this data to formulate and implement their LUMS and IDPs depending on a number of conditions stipulated by each data custodian. It appears that to make tools responsive to rural communities, municipalities must do more than just use the available datasets, but must take all necessary precautions to ensure that the tools demonstrate a level of openness and awareness of unique socio-cultural and economic dynamics in rural areas.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas 3.

LUMS at Local Government Level: the Case of Three Communities

Figure 1: Portions of Jozini Local Municipality with some unique land uses

a)

Jozini Case Study Community i.

Community Profile Jozini Local Municipality is located in the Northern parts of KwaZulu-Natal between Swaziland and Mozambique border areas. The Municipality covers 32% (3057 Square Kilometres) area of 13 859 square kilometres in uMkhanyakude District. The Municipality has six towns, and these are Ingwavuma, Jozini, Ubombo, Bhambanana, Mkuze and Ndumo (Jozini Municipality IDP, 2009-2010). The name Jozini originates from an ancient tale of spears discovered on the mountain caves near the large river in this area, and the Zulu word for a spear is ijozi (www.kznbusiness.co.za). The community has large population of Blacks forming 99.41%, with other racial groupings –Coloureds, Indians and Whites –comprising less than 1% (Jozini Municipality IDP, 2009/2010). There has been a significant increase in the population figures from 151 690 in 1996 to 207 375 in 2007 (Jozini Municipality IDP, 2009/2010).

In 2001, the gender profile was almost evenly distributed, with females forming 55% of total population and males forming 45%. Most (56%) household types are traditional settlements, 36% formal and 4% are informal settlements. Most people are unemployed and approximately 36% of the population earn no income and this has contributed to high levels of poverty (Jozini Municipality, IDP 2009/2010). In 2007 half of the population had no formal schooling, which explains the scarcity of skilled labour and more than 90% of the households falling below the poverty line and more families were said to dropping further below the poverty threshold (Jozini Municipality Local Economic Development Initiative, 2009).

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In its IDP, the municipality attributes the challenges faced by Jozini to the large portions of it being part of the former KwaZulu homeland government, which was neglected in terms of economic development and thus associated with dire poverty, lack of development and poor service provision (Jozini Municipality, IDP 2009/2010). The other portion belongs to the former Natal province which received better attention during apartheid era. Notwithstanding this history, the municipal officials and the traditional council mentioned that the Jozini area has a comparative advantage in terms of its favourable location along the Lebombo Spatial Development corridor and the abundant natural resources that provide potential tourism assets. The combination of climate and soils of Jozini have the greatest influence on agricultural production in the area, and an understanding of the patterns of these parameters is important in forward planning for suitable agricultural products (Jozini Municipality Local Economic Development Initiative, 2009). There was consensus among informants that Jozini is an ideal location for sugar cane and vegetables.

There are seven Traditional Council Areas in Jozini Municipality, and these are Nyawo, Jobe, Mngomezulu, Myeni, Gumede, Ntsinde and Mathenjwa. Poor service delivery has been raised as one of the challenges to development in Jozini area (Jozini Municipality, IDP 2009/2010). In addition to this, there are threats of high levels of diseases and environmental disturbance caused by water and sanitation problems in rural areas where number of people rely on subsistence farming (Jozini Municipality, IDP 2009/2010).

Jozini has areas referred to as state land, towards which both the municipality and communitybased informants had a negative attitude. This was symptomatic of different understandings between higher levels of government and people at grassroots level of what a state land is. It was said that the state land dates back to the 1980s, and was once referred as the Crown land under the British government according to the municipal official. The informants said that such lands are undevelopable and they mentioned cases where development on such areas was both disallowed and discontinued. Despite this, the graph below illustrates that Jozini continues to have economic advantage.

Table.1. Gross Geographic Product (Jozini Municipality Local Economic Development Initiative, 2009)

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas The table above indicates the estimated Gross Geographical Product (GGP) for Jozini. The major economic activities are the community service (57.7%) facilitated by the District Municipality and tourism (18%) facilitated by the local municipality. The other activities have smaller contributions of between 9.9% and 0.7%. (Jozini Municipality Local Economic Development Initiative, 2009) All these –population dynamics, socio-economic profiles, leadership dynamics, and economic activities –raise questions about whether or not the tools exist within the municipality to cater for, and respond to all these diversities. Such tools would contribute to increasing and better sustaining the standard of living, despite challenges relating to land ownership. It is within this background that land use management and planning in a community such as Jozini is discussed, and the section below examines this in detail. ii.

Land Use, Planning and Management in Jozini This section highlights different land uses, planning and management issues in Jozini Municipality within a particular socio-historical and cultural context. This discussion is informed by careful considerations about the extent to which the current tools used to deal with land cater for the declining economic activity, land and property development, rural economies and various standards of living is also interrogated, as well as the responsiveness thereof in dealing with land under traditional leadership, threatened ecosystem and addressing buoyant tourism industry. There is no LUMS in Jozini, though funds were committed to hiring consultants to prepare these in 2004. In the absence of formal guidelines, there is a set of activities that characterise how land issues are dealt with, and these include land ownership, land allocation, and various land uses. These issues are discussed at the level of procedures that are followed in the process of land planning and management.

Large portion of land in Jozini is owned and administered by Ingonyama Trust, while other portions are owned by individuals and the State respectively. Though policy does not make land ownership an issue in relation to municipalities, municipal officials indicate that the fact that the municipality has no ownership of land makes it difficult for them to deal effectively with land issues. However, there are differing views about this division of land ownership and whether or not there is land owned by the municipality at all. Nevertheless, the current land ownership has been cited as one of the reasons for the difficulties in controlling and facilitating development in the municipal areas.

In Jozini there are no guidelines and proper coordination of land allocation. The generally accepted procedures entail approaching the Induna with land applications, and then Amakhosi and their councils consider and decide on the applications. The traditional process of ukubekwa is often facilitated in this way, but some variations were noted. Such variations were linked to money incentives and non-compliance with IDP that were associated with land allocations in trust lands. Given the current realities where IDP encompasses traditional areas, there is an expectation that such allocation must be in harmony with the provisions of the IDP, but this becomes problematic if the IDP does not have guidelines related to land allocation. The municipal officials said that land allocation process by traditional leaders in Jozini disregarded the IDP for various reasons. These include allocating land in a haphazard manner that does not follow traditionally acceptable ways or formal ways stipulated by Ingonyama Trust Board. They alleged that the process was motivated largely by fraud, when izinduna use land allocation to gain money in the form of charging khonza fees. These fees differed from applicant to applicant as there were no clear standards that had been put in place. In Jozini there is obvious absence of proper guidelines for land allocation, because the IDP does not provide these and LUMS documents have not been finalised. This is an example of the failure and inadequacies of tools in Jozini to deal with land issues.

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This was said to have resulted to a number of challenges. These include double-allocation, clashes on development projects as well as delays related to allocation and or development projects. There is a flip-side of this as well. Whilst the municipal officials were concerned about this traditional land allocation that disregarded IDP requirements, traditional leaders expressed concerns about the IDP disregarding and being insensitive to the local culture. The Municipality disregarded the local indigenous knowledge about handling forestry from which indigenous medicinal plants are found.

In addition to this the informants highlighted that municipal demarcation created some problems in traditional council areas, whereby more than one tribe –e.g. Mngomezulu and Nyawo –was allotted to the same municipal ward. This has created tensions between these tribes, and these continue to hinder development.

The most dominant land uses are natural forests, retail, commercial agriculture, and residential (Jozini Municipality, IDP 2009/2010). Commercial land uses entail chain stores and street traders, while agricultural land uses includes subsistence farming and commercial agriculture. The informants reported that in the 1980s, local community was relocated from Makhathini area for a major commercial agricultural project called Mjindi Irrigation Scheme, was to be established. Promises were made to the community that it would benefit from this establishment. However, there appears to be different levels of understanding about arrangements in the process. While community members despaired that being part of the irrigation scheme was unaffordable and thus had not reduced poverty levels, the municipal officials provided an explanation about how and why such a situation had arisen in the first place. While community members were of the opinion that they were removed from their own land, the municipality officials clarified that it was not their land but that it was a state land earmarked for agriculture. Thus was not suitable for residential purposes.

The Local Economic Development (LED) manager pointed out that the Municipality has a Tourism Plan that seeks to maximise economic benefits but that it was impossible to implement, because the municipality did not own land. The LED manager claimed that, as a result of that reality the municipality and traditional council had conflicting development plans. Conflicting development plans were evidenced by the Nsinde and Nyawo traditional councils having their own development plans that run parallel to those of the municipality. The traditional leaders had proposed a huge development called Pongola Poort Dam Development, and had secured investors for it, but it was not in line with the IDP, according to the LED manager. Other plans that traditional leaders have include Cable Car, Game Park and a Golf Course for which they have mobilised support from Simangaliso Wetland Park Destination. It was reported that discussions between the municipality and Ingonyama Trust had been held as an attempt to transfer land ownership to municipality, but such attempts were not successful as the Trust insisted that land ownership would remain with traditional leaders while the municipality would continue to service the land. . In relation to the extent to which the current ways of land use management cater for declining and emerging areas of economic activity, it was found that such ways in Jozini were failing both in terms of catering for such activities and in regulating them. In this community there are unique areas of economic activity such as arts and craft, grass for thatching, informal trading and under-the-table substance dealings1. Currents practices are such that these activities are not coordinated and are not properly integrated with the municipality’s local economic development strategy. Though there are legal implications of some of these, such activities can be catered for spatially and legitimised because they are important for rural economies.

1

The activity is of questionable legality and is done by women informal traders who use vegetable trading as a cover for such dealings as various types of traditional beers, dagga, and man-made snuff.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas Any land use planning that is undertaken from time to time in Jozini, is largely reactive to the availability of investors and the extent to which traditional leaders want to involve the municipality in designing land use plans. Such practice is unable to address the experience that the dominant land use –commercial agriculture of Mjindi Irrigation Scheme –exacerbates rather than eradicate poverty. The group of women indicated that this Scheme was not increasing economies of scale in the area and better standard of living, because it was too expensive for the locals to participate. The informants from local community concurred with officials at municipality level that Jozini municipality was an ideal tourism destination with tourism plans in place but also that these could not be effectively implemented for reasons stated above. This indicated that the current land administration procedures in the municipality were not responsive to the needs of the people living in the land governed by traditional leaders. iii.

The Use of Policy Provision in Facilitating LUMS The section examines the extent to which the informants were aware and used policy provisions in dealing with land use planning and management. The section addresses the extent to which the existing policy provisions about systems and procedures for spatial planning and land allocation purposes are useful to traditional leadership.The analysis is done in relation to the following pieces of legislation: Municipality Structures Act, Municipality Systems Act, the KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Act and the Property Rates Act, which were mentioned by the informants in Jozini. The informants were asked to mention the policies that guided their work, and their response indicated their level of understanding of policy and their attitudes towards these policies.

Council commented on the policy provision that introduced rates in rural areas, and said that this must be done with due sensitivity to the conditions in these areas. Though the Property Rates Act was regarded as clear enough, it was also seen as one of those legislations that are yet to be implementable within rural communities. There was concern about how the Members of the Executive Committee (MEC) were handling this, which caused tensions between traditional leaders and the Municipality, as these have different views on development issues. According to the Mayor, the Municipal structures Act is not implementable in rural areas, because she saw it as failing to clearly define the roles to be played by all parties concerned in land use management. Contrary to the views of the Mayor, the IDP manager sees the current policies as enabling good working relationship between municipality and traditional leadership and they enforce legality and sustainability.

Among these policies, he made mention of the Municipal Structure Act, Municipal Systems Act, and the new Planning and Development Act (PDA). He said that for bigger development in Jozini, such as road construction, the DFA guides that process but the discretion of officials is used for local projects.

Poor clarity offered by policies about roles and responsibilities of traditional councils in planning and managing land has resulted in problems and obstacles associated with land allocation in rural areas such as Jozini. Providing clarity on roles and responsibilities of all structures involved in dealing with land in rural areas would contribute towards formulating a responsive LUMS model, which would have a positive effect on development.

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iv.

The Institutional Linkages in Facilitating LUMS Local institutional linkages –intra (within the institutions) and inter (between the institutions) –are crucial as they are better placed to provide a strong support base, and ensuring sustainability of land use planning and management in rural areas. This will create a platform whereby procedures and conditions take into account local knowledge in rural areas. Institutions beyond local levels are also crucial as they can provide different dynamics on the matter, i.e. fast-tracking land applications and land decisions at provincial and national spheres of government. This section discusses the linkages of all relevant institutions with reference to land use planning and management in Jozini. These institutions are traditional leadership, government structures, and private sector. To facilitate a healthy relationship between municipality and traditional leadership, a formalised synergistic partnership was established in Jozini, recognised by the district and became a model for the KZN adopted by COGTA. There is a formal guiding document that seeks to facilitate the working relationship between these two structures. The structure is chaired by the Mayor with a member of a traditional council being the deputy chairperson. It was through this partnership that a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the two structures was formalised. In terms of this MoU the municipality would continue to develop and service land, while the ownership and control will remain with traditional leaders.

Though other informants see this partnership as having contributed positively in the formalisation of Jozini town, others maintain that there are still tensions between two structures. This tension has impacted negatively on land use planning. Double allocation of land by traditional councils as a result of them excluding municipality in land administration processes has continued. On the other hand, the community development workers were concerned that they have not been properly accepted by the municipality and that there are no proper working relationship between their coordinator and the LED Manager responsible for most development projects in the municipality. There are also internal concerns about the municipality over and above its relations with other stakeholders. The Municipal Manager indicated that some problems faced by the municipality are a direct result of misalignments within its own departments. For instance, the current Director of Planning and Technical Services is failing to handle both these aspects of his work, but focuses more on the technical aspects at the expense of the planning aspects. This has undermined planning activities within the municipality.

All forms of institutional linkages in Jozini are not providing strong support base for land use planning and management and as such the procedures that are currently used have limited responsiveness and cannot ensure sustainability.

v.

Community Participation in LUMS To ensure that the existing tools for land use planning and management in Jozini are responsive to rural circumstances, platforms for promoting strong community involvement and participation are desirable. However, because there is no formal land use management system that informs either indigenous or municipal ways of dealing with land in Jozini, community participation here is examined only in terms of integrated development planning and land allocation processes. The general observation is that both traditional councils and the municipality in Jozini undermine meaningful community participation in these two processes.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas Community participation in Jozini spatial planning processes is limited to informing people about existing plans generated by the municipality, without involving them in the conceptualisation stages of such plans. The central concept adopted by the municipality to describe this process is ‘consultation’ rather than ‘participation’. The municipal officials said that they use IDP road shows to consult and inform the community about the budget processes. The IDP manager said that –during the road shows –the community lists and prioritises their needs in the presence of their traditional leaders. It was said that in Jozini both the traditional council and the municipality ensures a good, working relationship for the sustainability of the projects proposed in the IDP such as the housing projects. However, this was in contrast with the views of the ward committee that indicated that traditional council does not consider the voices of the community and that they also do not attend municipal housing forum meetings.

The IDP manager mentioned that community participation has been treated as a necessity rather than a legal requirement, and the municipality will further innovate this by partnering with the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA). According to the IDP manager, this is an innovative approach which would be more intense and informative on budget limitations and policy awareness issues. He maintains that through this approach the community will perceive participation as essential to their sustainability rather than seeing it as a political campaign strategy. The IDP manager sees rural communities as more concerned about their basic needs being met rather than being involved in the long-term planning for their community. He substantiates this point by indicating that these communities have no town planning knowledge and background and therefore not ready for effective and meaningful participation. Such an attitude has implications for the municipality’s conceptualisation and practicalisation of community participation.

Land allocation processes in Jozini are inconsistent and discriminating, which inevitably leads to limited participation, according to the women. They mentioned that rural communities value family bonds and good neighbourhood relations, which results to peace, harmony and low levels of criminal activities in the community. This social value is compromised in instances where the Induna allocates people without consulting the affected neighbours –as it is done under normative procedures –and conducting background check on the new resident’s criminal record status, is not done. Ward committee members mentioned that double allocations are also symptomatic of these inconsistencies in land allocation, which are mostly motivated by money making incentive associated with land allocation by the izinduna. While izinduna play a pivotal role in land allocation process in rural areas, they also have some authority in changes in land uses. The women revealed that they were excluded from such changes as they were neither consulted nor informed. A recent change in land use from sporting facility to being a residential area was performed without the involvement of the community. This was perceived as a negative change, as it deprived the youth of their recreational facility. This deprivation would lead to an increase in crime and substance abuse.

The current land use management tools used in Jozini indicate that community participation was being perceived by municipal officials as a vehicle to inform the community about IDP procedures.

On the other hand, the manner in which traditional councils dealt with land issues was still characterised by patriarchy and autocracy. A more creative and effective approach to community participation that would take seriously indigenous knowledge systems and socio-cultural factors is still required in Jozini to assist in ensuring that rural community needs are adequately catered for.

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vi.

The role of Technology in the implementation of LUMS Technical support to traditional councils is important for sustainable spatial planning and land allocation. This section interrogates the availability and usefulness of GIS as a technical supportive tool. Jozini Municipality does not have GIS but only relies on shared services provided by UMkhanyakude District Municipality. This indicates that local municipality does not have immediate support to render traditional councils during land allocation. Amakhosi indicated that traditional councils do not have cadastral maps for their areas and this has negatively impacted on land allocation –making double allocations inevitable in the –process and has resulted to tension between these councils.

The integration of various plans becomes even more critical if difficulties related to duplications and parallel land use planning are to be avoided. That is why the availability and the utilisation of the GIS technology are important. In Jozini, the municipality makes use of aerial photographs and GIS, but GIS data still needs to be updated to include latest information about the Jozini community, especially traditional council areas. Poor GIS system, and the uncoordinated discretionary approach by traditional leaders in land allocating raises concerns about the extent to which systems and procedures are provided to support traditional leaders for spatial planning and land allocation purposes.

vii.

Conclusions: Implications for Policy and Practice The Jozini case study records unique experiences that this community and its people have in relation to land use management and planning. Though policies and structures exist to facilitate land use management in communities such as this one, there are a number of factors that make this difficult to achieve. Among others, there is an uneasy and difficult linkage between key stakeholders responsible for land decisions within the municipality and those located outside the municipality, but have direct influence and control over land issues within it.

The failure for the existing synergistic partnership to strengthen relations between traditional authorities and the municipality means that this partnership must be well coordinated to ensure that land use and planning is properly facilitated to improve people’s livelihoods. In addition, this case study is an example of a rural area where policies fail to achieve its intents and are thus unable to effect proper practice. This has made the experience of state land in relation to development a negative one for Jozini community. There remains a need to establish strong institutional linkages that ensure that these structures work hand in hand in order to benefit rural communities.

Current policies governing state land do cater for declining economic activity at national level but do not ensure that rural communities in surrounding areas derive economic benefits. This section has also indicated fairly that current schemes and land use planning process, which are made to improve people’s livelihood are –to a larger extent –not catering for rural communities and economies of scale.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas viii.

Recommendations for Change This section provides recommendations that can bring positive change in land use, planning and management in Jozini as articulated by informants. Policy regulations must be formulated to regulate and emphasise a synergistic partnership between municipalities and traditional authorities, and to ensure community participation in land use planning and management. Such regulations must clearly outline the role of all decision-makers, both at local, provincial and national levels, involved in dealing with land issues in rural areas. There is a need for the Jozini Municipality to play an administrative role in pursuing settlement plan that will reshape the current city image and address issues of survivalist (informal traders) and informal settlements.

Planners must be directly involved in developing such settlement plans and guidelines on land allocation, as they possess valuable knowledge, according to the Municipal Manager. In addition to specialist knowledge, community participation must be encouraged to ensure that these plans are sensitive to the socio-cultural outlook of the area. The challenges of land ownership may be addressed through reviewing the current memorandum of understanding between traditional leadership and municipality to include provincial and national government and communities. This will create a transparency, communication and sustainable development. For example, Jozini Housing Development Project was discontinued before its final phase due to the lack of transparency, communication and adherence to memorandum of agreement.

In keeping with the Constitution, the municipalities must promote service delivery and ensure safe and sustainable communities, because this has not benefited the Jozini community, as there are still serious delays in infrastructural services. The informants blame the government for allocating responsibility to provide these at a district level and they recommended that providing these services must be a responsibility of a local municipality.

The Department of Cooperate Governance and Traditional Affairs has influence on traditional leaders and can play a significant role in defining their role in relation to municipality and establishing mechanisms where they can play this role effectively. Among other things, the MEC of the Department may address traditional leaders in a workshop and encourage them to attend municipal council meetings.

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b)

Mandeni Case Study Community

Figure 2: Portion of Mandeni Local Municipality with some unique land uses

i.

Community Profile The Mandeni Local Municipality Area (KZ291) is strategically located midway between Durban and Richards Bay, and lies on the development corridor on the North Coast between these two major port cities in KwaZulu-Natal (Mandeni Integrated Development Plan 2009/10). It is located on the major railway and road transportation routes which link these two economic hubs in the province. It is approximately 582 square kilometres in size and borders uMlalazi Municipality in the north within proximity of the Amatikulu River; the cross border interface is mainly agriculture with vast pieces of sugar cane farms as well as minimal forest and timber plantations whilst the western part in the inland is vastly traditional settlement. (Mandeni Integrated Development Plan 2009/10). In the south, it is bordered with KwaDukuza Municipality in the southern bank of Tugela River. In terms of cross border alignment, the dominant land use from both ends is sugarcane farming. The Mandeni Local Municipality has 16 municipal wards.

Mandeni Local Municipality is part of ILembe District Municipality and it accounts for 23.4% of the total District population. In 2004, the Mandeni Municipality’s population size was estimated at 131 391. Of this total, 53% are females and the remaining 47% are males. The Municipality is characterised by a young population with low education levels, as well as a high incidence of HIV/ AIDS prevalence, which is growing progressively over time (Mandeni Integrated Development Plan 2009/10).

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas Land tenure pattern within a Municipality often determine the land planning, management and usage. The Mandeni Municipality is made up of three traditional council areas (TCAs) namely, Macambini, Mathonsi and Isikhonyana where settlement is controlled by Traditional Councils according to a traditional system of land allocation (Mandeni Integrated Development Plan 2009/10).

These areas are generally characterised by subsistence farming activities, harsh topographical conditions and the worst off agricultural potentials with the exception of the Macambini Traditional Council Area which lies along the coast (Mandeni Integrated Development Plan 2009/10).

To address the environmental sensitivity of Mandeni a study was commissioned to look at the environmental situation in the greater Mandeni area, identifying, among other things, the biophysical environment, existing conservation areas, and agricultural potential, and a number of important environmental opportunities and constraints in the area (Mandeni Integrated Development Plan 2009/10). The outcomes of the study contributed towards the preparation of the Municipality’s environmental spatial framework plan that identifies the most important areas of special concern (Mandeni Integrated Development Plan 2009/10). These include the nature reserves, namely the Amatikulu, Harold Johnson and the Ngwenya. Key wetland areas, forest areas and grasslands were delineated as a result of this study (Mandeni Integrated Development Plan 2009/10). This is a guiding plan for the Municipality, which clearly indicate areas where urban development should be prohibited, special care areas and areas where there are no special considerations.

The tools to guide land planning, management and usage exist in Mandeni, but there remain tensions between the traditional systems of doing things and those adopted by the municipality. The section below demonstrates this disjuncture in some detail. ii.

Land Use, Planning and Management in Mandeni This section outlines issues of land use, planning and management in Mandeni Municipality and how these are guided in either a sustainable or a less sustainable manner through existing tools.

The sequence of the discussion entails the pattern of land ownership that exists in the municipality; land allocation processes and various land uses. The responsiveness of current tools used in Mandeni to deal with land under traditional leadership, threatened ecosystem and addressing buoyant tourism industry as well as the extent to which they cater for the declining economic activity, land and property development, rural economies and various standards of living, are interrogated.

It was observed that such tools in Mandeni were attempting to strike a balance between development needs of the people on one hand and sustaining a fragile ecosystem on the other. The zoned areas along the coast for instance have been identified as highly sensitive in terms of environment preservation. It has been prescribed in the SDF and IDP documents that no heavy industrial development should take place in these areas. The Senior Planner mentioned that Mandeni has three Town Planning Schemes and these are Isithebe (though SDF and IDP documents make mention of Wangu), Sundumbili and Tugela Mouth that regulate urban areas. However, she pointed out that the traditional council areas do not have these Planning Schemes that regulate spatial organisation of land use in these areas. In the absence of Schemes in areas administered by Ingonyama Trust, land use management is fraught with challenges, particularly regarding land allocation procedures.

The traditional council areas cover approximately 63% of the total area where the Ingonyama Trust own the majority of the land within the coastal and inland reaches of Mandeni, but there are no settlement plans. The remaining portion (37%) of land is publicly (government sector) and privately (private sector) owned and settlement plans exist for these. Different forms of land ownership have different implications for land use management, and this translate into diversified land allocation practices, some of which are not properly coordinated.

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The system of land allocation in traditional council areas involves approaching induna, who then facilitates a dialogue with the entire structure of traditional leadership and the neighbours who would be affected by such allocation. However, both the Ward Councillors and IDP Manager mentioned that land allocation is a challenge because traditional leaders allocate people for residential purposes on the township edges and also on dangerous areas such as on top of gas pipes. Such sporadic land allocation has changed the settlement pattern by introducing shack dwellings on the township edges, and this has occurred particularly in Mathaba and Mathonsi Traditional Council areas. Furthermore, this has caused challenges to the Municipality because the shack dwellers ultimately demand similar services rendered to township residents. IDP Manager indicated that the Municipality finds it difficult to provide these people with basic infrastructural services such as access roads, water-borne sewerage and piped water because of access related problems. It was alleged that sporadic land allocation by traditional leaders was often motivated by money incentives, because they charged more khonza fee. While this experience in Mandeni indicates poor communication between traditional leaders and municipality in terms of land allocation and their clashing visions and commitments in managing land, it also indicates failure of the existing tools to facilitate spatial planning.

Sugar cane is the dominant agricultural land use in the area although amadumbe (yams), umbila (maize) and ubhatata (sweet-potatoes) are also prominent agricultural products grown in the area.

In the past fifteen years, sugar cane farmers in the Municipality used their field for subsistence purposes, but have not been given proper training on business management. As a result, some of them have managed their finances poorly and have been declared insolvent, especially in Macambini traditional council area. The use of sugarcane farms has been on a short-term, hand-to-mouth basis with no long-term wealth creation goals. There has been no support from the Amatikulu Sugar Mill, which benefits from the community supply of sugar cane produce. The senior municipal official perceived this lack of support to the farmers as indicative of, and exacerbating, the exploitation by Hullets of these small scale sugarcane farmers in the area. Due to the lack of support for sugarcane and other small scale farming, there has been visible decline in such economic activities in the area.

In addition to this, the ward councillors indicated that though land is fertile for various agricultural activities, the produce has not been of good quality because agricultural advisors from the Department of Agriculture have not provided the locals with technical, financial and logistical support. To compound this problem, the livestock are uncontrolled due to the absence of proper grazing land.

The ward councillors mentioned that the majority of cases reported to and handled by the Traditional Courts, are largely about uncontrolled livestock. This is a problem because it contributes to conflicts within the community that are linked to livestock destroying subsistence crops in the fields.

Based on a number of environmental conditions such as geology, soil depth and precipitation, proper caution must be applied when utilising land in Mandeni. The land along the coast is considered highly sensitive and requiring protection from huge developments such as the Dubai proposal. Some inconsistencies were apparent in dealing with the Dubai proposal in Mandeni. While the land proposed for this development was considered sensitive and thus unsuitable for this kind of development, the municipality and other leadership structures had approved it nonetheless.

However the community refused to make their land available for this on the basis of its insensitivity to dominant cultural aspirations. Some members of the community believed that the Dubai built environment would not be desirable because the natural beauty of the area would be compromised and this would further compromise tourism benefits.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas The existing land use scenario such as South Africa Pulp and Paper Industry (Sappi) operations being in close proximity to residential and commercial land uses is problematic. The Mandeni Municipality has prepared the SDF as a way of regulating the land uses, but is limited in dealing with Sappi, because the IDP manager said that the Sappi Mill is a land owner and is not complying with the municipal by-laws. He also indicated that the Municipality does not have environment section that could address this issue. In the meantime, Sappi continues to emit polluted air to the surrounding community. The Mayor indicated that the Municipality has since engaged in conversation with Sappi to promote their compliance with some by-laws, and the Mill agreed to enhance the capacity of its ventilating pipes so that people could not inhale the polluted air or emissions.

The findings from the key informants revealed that the tools available to guide land use planning and management were not adequately responsive to the needs of the people in rural areas of Mandeni. The IDP manager indicated that the separate land related laws were confusing and that because of this it was difficult to deal with them. One portion of land in Mandeni is administered using Town Planning Ordinance Act and the other is using Development Facilitation Act as well as the discretion of the traditional council. In addition there were areas where a combination of laws was used. For example, to address the land sensitivity in Macambini area, the Municipality had prepared an environmental plan that discourage the huge developments, but this plan was found to be inconsistent because a huge investment from Dubai was favoured by the Municipality contrary to the existing SDF. This is typical of the kinds of tools that are not reliable and were unable to facilitate land planning and management in a consistent manner. iii.

The Use of Policy Provision in Facilitating LUMS This section examines the use of policy provision in facilitating land use planning and management in Mandeni towards determining whether existing systems and procedures are useful in dealing with rural land in this Municipality. Such examination is from the perspective of the informants residing in the municipality. The IDP manager demonstrated a deep understanding of policy provision in relation to wall-to-wall municipal arrangement and the time this came to effect in South Africa. He indicated that in preparing and implementing LUMS the Municipality must involve the community at the early stages of the process. To achieve this he said that the Municipality had organised workshops for traditional leaders in order to get their views on LUMS as well as to discuss their possible roles and responsibilities in the process.

This he said was done in keeping with the Municipal Structures Act that emphasises the importance of ensuring traditional leadership representation and participation in the municipal council. This practice was not confirmed by the Traditional Council members who raised concerns that their representation in the Municipal Council had not been achieved to their expectation and satisfaction.

The Senior Planner demonstrated some optimism about the prospects of the new KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Act. He said that the Act is more user-friendly to planners, because applications processes will be fast-tracked and environmental impact assessment (EIA) will be completed before applications are received by the Municipality.

The experience of policy usefulness in Mandeni indicates some partiality on how policy is received by both the Municipality and traditional council. While the Municipality sees some potential benefits on enhancing efficiency in the process, the traditional council saw failures or weaknesses in promoting community involvement and meaningful participation.

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iv.

The Institutional Linkages in Facilitating LUMS This section discusses the different forms of linkages between various institutions and how these enable the responsiveness and usefulness of the existing land use planning and management tools in Mandeni. It is essential that all affected structures and local people participate meaningfully in the planning processes. Traditional council pointed out that there is weak communication and consultation mechanisms in dealing with land related issues.

This is evidenced by how traditional leaders guide their people in the context of unrest about service delivery. People in Mandeni have resolved that extreme measures must be taken to remove the Mayor, Municipal Manager and the party representative from their respective positions because they have failed to expedite service delivery. Of the three traditional leaders, one discouraged this extreme position, while the other one supported it. The third one was undecided. This explains why the strong institutional linkage between the municipality and traditional leadership has not been achieved in Mandeni.

This weak linkage shown in poor communication, consultation and collaboration between the two structures has caused unbearable spatial configuration, particularly in traditional council areas. In these areas, people are often allocated in land unsuitable for residential purposes. In addition to this weak linkage between traditional leadership and municipality, a similar weakness was detected between the municipality and other sector departments. It was reported that the Department of Human Settlements ignored the IDP when providing low-cost housing in the Mathonsi Traditional Council area.

There was consensus among informants that the synergistic partnership must be formalised and legalised in order to properly manage land use issues in rural areas. Currently the existing institutional systems, procedures, and support available to traditional councils have limited usefulness for spatial planning and land allocation in Mandeni. The issue of allocating people on the township edge is still prevalent in this area.

v.

Community Participation in LUMS An in-depth understanding of community and its cultural outlook is desirable to improve spatial planning and land allocation in rural contexts. This section analyses the community participation experience in the preparation and implementation of land use planning and management in Mandeni, as well as the importance of considering the people’s cultural orientation. Apart from the legal requirements, the Municipality in Mandeni takes community participation very seriously because people know their problems and solutions better, according to the IDP manager. He indicated that, community participation and consultation was done through informing community on all procedures the municipality uses for land administration and planning. To strive for the meaningful participation, he mentioned that the Municipality has organised workshops for traditional leaders and the locals in order to get their views on land use planning and management as well as their roles and responsibilities in the processes. The senior municipal officials mentioned that the Municipality presents the plans related to land use planning and management to the community through IDP Road Shows.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas Stakeholders in the community take community participation even more seriously to the extent of questioning the depth and worth of their participation in municipal created platforms. It was reported that community participation in Mandeni is undermined in major development investments.

For instance, the senior municipal official indicated that a massive development of building a city within a city, in Macambini Traditional Council area, proposed by investors from Dubai was rejected by local people because they claimed that they had not been properly consulted. This rejection happened despite the fact that these investors had engaged relevant powers that be including, Ingonyama Trust, Isilo, a local Inkosi and provincial government. Contrary to the earlier reasons for rejection provided by community-based informants, Ingonyama Trust indicated that the project was not approved by the Trust because proper consent had not been obtained from the Macambini Traditional Council.

The experience in Mandeni reveals clashing dispositions between municipality and community regarding their seriousness about community participation. On one hand the municipality has not adequately created mechanisms to facilitate participation regardless of their claims to be serious about this. In cases where mechanisms were in place to facilitate this, they are limited to specific projects rather than informed by broader visions for development. For example when a housing project is implemented in the area, a project steering committee is formed. In a township a ward councillor usually leads this Committee as a chairperson, while in traditional leadership areas, Amakhosi take the lead. On the other hand are the community members who demand their right to genuinely participate in land use planning and management. This means therefore that the tools for land use planning and management in Mandeni are not adequately responsive to rural areas in the context of uneven and pretentious community participation. vi.

The role of Technology in the implementation of LUMS Geographic Information System (GIS) is one of the important technological tools that can be used to facilitate land use planning and management in rural areas, such as Mandeni. In Mandeni the need for technical support directed to traditional council for spatial planning and land allocation processes should not be under-estimated as Izinduna allocate people in hazardous sites. However, currently GIS is not updated and therefore not fully operational.

For GIS to be operational there needs to be computers, people with skills to operate them as well as the up-to-date data. Senior Planner indicated that in Mandeni Municipality the GIS is not operational because data is outdated and GIS operators are not available. This is typical of a scenario where the system is not facilitating land use planning and management. In addition to this challenge, Inkosi reported that Amakhosi have neither maps nor technical expertise that could be used to enhance sustainability in land allocation processes.

vii.

Conclusions: Implications for Policy and Practice There is a strong cultural and spiritual attachment to land in Mandeni area, particularly in traditional council areas. Their spiritual attachment is shown when most people claimed they would rather prefer to suffer and remain unemployed compared to giving up their land, particularly to developers coming from outside the community. This reality is important to consider in striving towards sustainable land use management in Mandeni.

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There is a lack of communication and legally binding partnership between key stakeholders in Mandeni area and this has caused more spatially related challenges. For instance, traditional leaders often do not have access to GIS, which would clearly indicate undevelopable and hazardous areas unsuitable for human settlement. Such communication will address the challenge posed by sector departments engaging in projects that are in conflict with the IDP and SDF of the municipality.

In processes that shape land use such as IDP and SDF, traditional leaders only participate in their ex-officio capacity where they only advise with no voting right or power to influence decisions. They are also not happy with the current policy provision that only allows for their 20% representation in the municipal council. The vagueness in policy guidelines that compromises collaborative planning and community participation has resulted in a situation where developments were to be blocked.

Through collaborative planning the community’s cultural orientation could be understood so as to avoid such situations and develop community-sensitive tools to facilitate development. viii.

Recommendations for Change These recommendations are articulated from the perspectives of the informants interviewed. It was indicated that strong and formalised institutional linkages are needed in this area because current synergistic partnership between traditional council and the municipality is neither working nor legally binding, from the point of view of the traditional council. Therefore, it is recommended that this must be legalised to promote collaboration between the two structures. In taking decisions at municipal council levels, ex-officio capacities of traditional leaders must be done away with so that these leaders may be awarded voting rights or equivalent powers on land related decisions.

A strong land allocation body that would consist of traditional councils and the municipality is needed in order to develop the agreed upon settlement plan that will facilitate infill development.

This will assist both the structures in facilitating allocation because people will be allocated on designated residential sites. This is in line with the notion of separate land use. This would address the problem of livestock invading and destroying crops because they will be kept on the fenced grazing land.

Sector departments must comply with the planning guidelines such as the IDP in order to deliver services in line with the municipal vision. There is a need for cultural awareness in preparing and implementing land use management tools so that these are sensitive to the community being served. Training workshops for small scale farmers are needed for sustainable agriculture and to strengthen their economic viability.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas c)

Nkandla Case Study Community

Figure 3 Portion of Nkandla Local Municipality showing unique land uses

i.

Community Profile Nkandla Municipality forms part of UThungulu District Municipality. Nkandla is surrounded by the following municipalities, Ulundi in the north, Nquthu in the North West, Msinga in the west, Maphumulo in the south, Umlalazi in the south east, and Mthonjaneni in the south. The Municipality has identified a hierarchy of nodes in its current Spatial Development Framework, and these are classified as primary (Nkandla Town), secondary (Qhudeni, Fort Louis, Dolwane and Lindefa) and tertiary (remaining settlements) nodes. These nodes are strategically developed to act as springboards for economic development in the municipality (Nkandla IDP, 2010-2011).

Nkandla occupies an area of 1827km2 and has a population of 127 451 people, with a density of 62 people per km2. Racial profile of Nkandla is 100% Black with 43% being males and 57% females (Nkandla IDP, 2010-2011). Service delivery remains a challenge as 66% of the population do not have access to clean piped water, 77% are without sanitation, 95% are without electricity, 93% have no access to refuse removal and 80% are without housing (Nkandla IDP, 2010-2011). However, it needs to be mentioned that some statistical information provided by the Nkandla IDP (2010-2011) report is unreliable, because inconsistencies were noted, especially in relation to unemployment figures. For instance, the same Nkandla IDP (2010/2011) report puts unemployment rate at 25% and at 90% simultaneously, and this is confusing. For people who heavily and entirely rely on statistics to respond to the needs of rural communities, such statistical inaccuracies are problematic.

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Like many rural areas in KwaZulu-Natal, most (98%) of the land in the Nkandla Municipality is administered by the Ingonyama Trust on behalf of traditional leaders and only 2% is owned by municipality (land where the Nkandla town is situated). There are differing views between informants on whether or not the municipality does in fact own the 2% of land as indicated above. Nkandla has eighteen Traditional Councils.

Within Nkandla Municipality there are two large commercial plantations - namely Nkonisa (5265 ha of which 478 ha are planted) and Qhudeni (6050 ha of which 1443 ha are planted). These have the potential to provide employment opportunities to the local population. Furthermore, Nkandla is endowed with national treasures and Zulu historical sites in the form of a game reserve called Matshenezimpisi and the graves of the Zulu kings such as King Malandela and King Cetshwayo respectively. From the municipality’s perspective, Nkandla is placed at a strategic tourism node as it has various cultural treasures mentioned above, but some see these treasures as not bringing any financial benefits to the community at all. Despite this concern, this tourism node has the potential to kick start economic development and the municipality through its local economic development (LED) has already developed a plan to establish a Bed and Breakfast (B&B) facility. ii.

Land Use, Planning and Management in Nkandla This section outlines issues of land use, planning and management in Nkandla Municipality. This is done by looking at how responsive the current tools are in dealing with trust lands, threatened ecosystem and addressing buoyant tourism industry, as well as the extent to which these tools cater for the declining economic activity, land and property development, rural economies and various standards of living. Indigenous land use planning and management practices in Ingonyama Trust owned areas and the western practices used by the municipality are outlined with accompanying challenges in order to understand the current situation in Nkandla. The discussion starts off by outlining land tenure arrangements, land allocation procedures and land uses in the municipality.

It was observed that the challenges facing land use planning and management practice in Nkandla are linked to land ownership, land claims and restitution, as well as parallel and uncoordinated land management activities. Various informants mentioned that the town itself was not developing due to unresolved issues of land ownership. Talking to the planner in the municipality, it was learnt that only 2% of the land belongs to the municipality, and that land includes the site on which the town is situated. However, the Traditional Council indicated that such a claim was not as neat and straight forward as earlier thought. It was alleged that all the land on the edge of the town either belonged to the traditional council or to private individuals who have title deeds for those sites. As a result, any development attempt by investors has met stiff resistance and the informants said that the municipality was powerless to act in any decisive manner. The other factor compounding this problem is that it is extremely difficult to utilise the land owned by traditional leaders, because it was alleged that these leaders were making it difficult for the municipality to access the land.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas Nkandla, like other areas in KZN and South Africa, generally has faced the issues of land claims and land restitution, which have not been successfully concluded. It was reported that this had contributed to difficulties in the proper filling-in of information in application forms for various development initiatives. Land use planning and management is negatively affected when unresolved issues like these persist. In addition, Ingonyama Trust and municipality have parallel land use management systems, and it was mentioned that collaboration of some kind existed between them, but this was not systematic and have not been formalised. It was reported that the lack of systemic collaboration had resulted in some ward councillors soliciting development directly from development service providers such as Eskom, and such moves proved not to be sustainable either.

For instance, electricity services have been postponed in some wards that had previously been prioritised. These processes mentioned here are not properly coordinated, and as such duplications have been inevitable. There are no maps produced by the municipality and kept by traditional councils about designated development areas. On the same breadth Ingonyama Trust does not keep a list of projects which it has approved in their land to avoid scenarios of having other projects allocated in the same area as this would affect the project sustainability.

The SDF has been developed in terms of which land is zoned for various uses, taking into consideration environmental factors. Primary, secondary as well as tertiary economic development nodes have been identified. In that way, any investment can be channelled to the designated area as provided for in the SDF. The deputy mayor said that although there were no serious environmental factors that were threatened by development projects, she nevertheless highlighted that during the construction of the main road connecting Eshowe to Nkandla, certain areas were designated as butterfly zones, and that they should not be disturbed. In this sense, both economic needs and environmental ones had been addressed.

However, the challenge has been the buy-in of the local community in terms of understanding what the Spatial Development Framework is about and what it seeks to address. Issues surrounding the extent to which all relevant stakeholders were properly consulted in the process of developing these plans remain a subject for further debates. For instance, a group of men expressed their reservations about a lack of transparency from the municipality side regarding this matter. Imposition of development plans by municipality was cited by these men. Traditional leaders cited lack of their involvement at the initial stages of such development plans, only to be shown maps that have been developed at a later stage. As a result, traditional councils continue to design their own development plans which are not aligned to those of the municipality. When situations like these happen, frustrations among municipal officials result regarding some traditional practices that they regard as not embracing the SDF. They nevertheless have come to the realisation of the need to engage traditional leaders on SDF and its contents, i.e. awareness about the importance of economic nodes.

The SDF outlines the economic potential of Nkandla as a whole, which the planner indicated that it was briefly explained to traditional leaders, though the main debates that arouse were about the issues of relocating people to alternative residential sites. The issue of compensation is another area of contestations and contributes tremendously in communities refusing to relocate to make way for new developments in the area. The other area that needs attention is the question of development nodes, because not all people recognise the benefit of the tourism aspect of development nodes.

This remains an area where it was mentioned that, from the municipal point of view, more training is still required so that local people generally and traditional leaders in particular can be made to see the need for development nodes.

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When a person needs a residential site or to start a business, slightly different procedures are followed. For the land allocation under the traditional council or Ingonyama Trust, allocation is done in two ways. The first one involves consulting the ward councillor, who then approaches the traditional leader, who then passes a matter to the Induna - (this might differ from ward to ward and is largely applicable when applicants are coming from outside the community). An alternative to this, which is often followed by the locals, is when one approaches an induna who will allocate land for the applicant and the process of ukubekwa will be conducted under specified conditions. During the discussions with groups of men and women, it emerged that stringent measures are applied for new residents applying for sites from other places. For these applicants, information is sought regarding their place of origin, preferably a letter from the previous traditional authority, and the reason for leaving their previous area of residence was solicited. Such processes contributed to reducing criminal activity. However, women headed households are not allowed to settle unless a woman is staying with a male partner or have a male child who will be regarded as the head of the family. This procedure does not apply to women who are local with known families and want to have their own residences.

If a person wants a site for business purposes, then after approaching Induna and the site has been identified, the next step is to approach Ingonyama Trust, and as part of the application to the Trust, the municipality must sign the form. In many instances this part of the process has proved to be difficult to successfully implement for various reasons. It has been alleged that Ingonyama Trust board –which owns the land in traditional areas–is invisible to the majority of the people and is only known on paper and this has negative effect on development. There was unanimity among informants that the Trust uses ITB forms, which are technical and in English and thus not easily accessible to the illiterate members of the community, and the process often clashes with current systems used by the municipality. Consequently, most filled-in forms are returned due to incompletion and improper information having been filled-in. To respond to this dilemma, the informant within the Ingonyama Trust said that everyone speaks English and the returning of forms were not linked to the technicality of the forms and linguistic challenges, but was related to applicants not properly following procedures. This contradicts what the Trust said in an earlier study, where another informant within the Trust acknowledged the difficulties around the language used in the form. That informant had said that plans were in place to address the issue of the language that was inaccessible to the majority of the members of rural areas for whom the form is intended.

A slightly different process is followed when the land is needed for development projects. Here, the process of land allocation commences with a prospective investor making a presentation to the Municipal EXCO and then to the full Council. During this process an applicant is asked to produce evidence of his or her capacity to embark on such a develop project. If these proposals are approved, the Town Planner then does zoning of the land and presents land options to the Traditional Council in the presence of the Mayor. It was reported that such processes have taken place in a smooth fashion. It was alleged that for any other development that has taken place in the area, traditional leaders were consulted by being approached individually in order to clearly explain the intention and procedures.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas The relationship between traditional leaders and Ingonyama Trust in Nkandla is a complex one, and such complexity is associated both with deeper understandings of land ownership, land use planning and management processes, as well as the resultant benefits. Some Amakhosi expressed misgivings about the Ingonyama Trust being regarding as a land owner in the context where people in rural areas understanding this ownership to be residing with Amakhosi. Amakhosi argue that Ingonyama Trust was initially mandated to administer the land on behalf of the traditional leaders but subsequently things have changed to the Trust having the final say on land issues and it was claimed the Trust often overrides the decisions of traditional leaders. Some traditional leaders despaired that practically the traditional leaders do not own the land of the communities they lead.

As a result, contrary to the belief by many in this community, the role of traditional leaders in land allocation processes is minimal. Actually the procedure is handled by the Ingonyama Trust for residential and business uses by offering long-term and short-term leases. Ingonyama Trust has become an enormously powerful entity which some sceptics can call, is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The feeling expressed by informants was that when needed, the Trust was not available to assist, but at the same time traditional leaders could not move because the Trust was contradicting their decisions.

There are three broad categories of land uses in the municipality, and these are residential, commercial and agricultural land uses. Within these broad ones are specific ones such as subsistence farming and commercial plantations. In three towns within the municipality –Nkandla, Dolwane and Qhudeni –are land uses for business activities. Informants did not mention these types of land uses and this raises questions about their level of awareness and or benefits these uses have on their livelihoods. The only land uses highlighted by informants were residents, grazing, communal gardens, cemeteries, and household graveyards. Settlement patterns are characterised by clustered dwellings consisting of rondavels and other houses made of corrugated iron roofing, and rented establishments. A number of informants indicated that it is people dwelling in these rented houses who demonstrate lack of respect for traditional leadership and values relating to burial practices.

It was reported for instance that people in these establishments preferred to bury their loved ones in a public cemetery rather in the household graveyards. Two out of eighteen traditional leaders endorsed public cemetery system, while others continued to subscribe to the traditional household burial system. These systems were said to both have positive and negative sides. While traditional burial system was preferred by most communities in the municipality for cultural and financial reasons, the municipal officials regarded it as a health hazards, because it was not regulated.

The other land use is grazing, which has a pattern of seasonality and was more prevalent in the past. When land is allocated for purposes of settlement, land for grazing forms part of the package, and grazing is always communal. Indigenous knowledge allocates sites for grazing only in winter season, and these are called amakhaphelo, which can be in a form of a mountain. In allocating these, the distance from the rivers where the cattle will drink, is carefully considered.

Another land use is subsistence farming which usually takes the form of a family garden or a plot in a communal garden. Whenever land is allocated for settlement purpose, a suitable site for izivande is considered. Each household usually has its own garden, some of which were obtained through the government’s one-home-one-garden poverty eradication project. However, communal gardens exist, and the allocation of these is done through izinduna who often issue written permits to community members.

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Culture has a role to play in indigenous land use planning processes by stipulating for instance the conditions under which land can or cannot be used. Such restrictions entail, the suspension of ploughing activities a few days until the funeral is concluded in cases where a local person has died, and also when natural disaster such as storms have been experienced. It is believed that adherence to such rituals help prevent the recurrence of destructive storms. Similarly, when people have to be relocated in order to accommodate industrial development projects, graves have to be dug and relocated as well, and certain rituals have to be performed to achieve this. Sometimes, graves are not relocated but rituals are carried out nonetheless.

Nkandla is also typical of the community where the sustainability of tourism sites is threatened. The major tourists’ attraction is Matshenezimpisi Game Reserve, which faces closure because of shrinking support from Ezemvelo Wildlife and its inability to generate enough revenue for sustenance. iii.

The Use of Policy Provision in Facilitating LUMS This section focuses on enablers for the facilitation of land use planning and management practices. Some of these enablers are pieces of legislation already outlined in the policy section earlier.

Viewed from this perspective, policy provisions do not clearly define roles between municipalities and traditional leadership. One of these is the Municipal Rates Act, in terms of which municipality must charge rates for services provided, however, within the context of rural areas and Nkandla Municipality in particular, such an exercise was extremely difficult to implement. The planner indicated that it is not possible to charge rates in traditional council areas because the municipality does own land, the current services for roads and schools are provided for and maintained by other such as Departments of Education and Works.

IDP manager sees the current policies as enabling good working relationship between municipality and traditional leadership and he regarded these as enforcing legality and sustainability. This is mainly because, the Municipal Rates Act had a challenge of not being easily received by the traditional leaders, and the PDA is no different. The main solution, according to the mayor, is through workshops regarding the benefits this Act may have to rural areas. According to the planner, PDA grants authority to the municipality to control land and this has been raised as a challenge on a number of occasions in the district planners’ forum. He indicated that there is consensus among planners in the forum that the PDA was designed for urban settings by urban developers, and thus has little relevance for rural areas. Such a critique, coming from planners is significant as it points to the poor usefulness of policy in guiding land planning and management in rural areas. Whether workshops on increasing policy awareness are conducted, this does not guarantee that the policy would be any more useful in this process.

iv.

The Institutional Linkages in Facilitating LUMS There are a number of institutions in Nkandla that must form strong linkage to support and ensure sustainability on land use planning and management. These are traditional councils, Ingonyama Trust, Municipality and sector departments such as Rural Development and Land Reform and Department of Corporate Governance and Traditional Affairs (COGTA).

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas Some traditional leaders said that there is a working relationship between municipality and traditional leaders though the municipality does not engage traditional leaders effectively. One of the evidence of this lack of engagement is precisely about development plan implementations. Traditional leaders highlighted that whenever major developments initiatives such as the installation of network aerial were conducted, no consultation was done with traditional leaders even though they are responsible for the areas being developed. It was a normal occurrence to see surveyors working on site without informing a local traditional leader in that area. This happens despite the fact that there are cultural considerations when dealing with land, which need to be taken into account. Proper consultation would create a healthy conversation between the indigenous and western practices on land use planning and management. Notwithstanding these challenges, attempts were being made particularly by the planner and senior officials to improve consultations.

The notion of institutional linkages has usually been associated with contemplated or actual collaborative activities between traditional leadership and municipalities. However, within the context of Nkandla this notion of linkages appears to be problematic whereby, Amakhosi and Ingonyama Trust are not working in harmony with each other. Amakhosi were concerned that land restitution and redistribution initiative have returned the land to the community rather than the Amakhosi who were the owners before dispossession. Despite the existence of Ingonyama Trust, traditional leaders said that they needed advisors to offer guidance on land administration and allocation process and that the municipal council should work in collaboration with them to improve land use planning and management in Nkandla area.

COGTA allocates funds towards capacity development of the spatial planning unit and continuous professional support, but this has been heavily challenged by the ever changing staff complement within the Department, which compromises institutional memory of the process. This challenge causes further delays in preparing SDFs and LUMS. Some confusion were noted regarding the roles played by COGTA and the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform in dealing with land, and the municipal- officials believe that there is a weak linkage between these departments. v.

Community Participation in LUMS The spatial planning and land allocation can be improved by strengthening community participation rather than mere involving people in readymade decision in Nkandla. Seeking peoples buy-in is often sugar coated and sometimes mistaken with community participation. Community participation is one of the required stages in the IDP process and various government officials mentioned that it is a stage where the community is consulted using IDP Road shows. The planner said that community participation in implementation of LUMS in Nkandla rural communities marginalises certain class of people who can meaningfully participate by placing meetings during business hours and a change in this would enhance this stage. Currently, communities report all matters related to LUMS to their designated ward councillors though this process has a challenge since some tribes are located between two wards thus creating tensions and conflicts between communities within a tribe and between tribes.

However, this process was found to be a challenge for various reasons. For instance, while Amakhosi indicated that the relationship between them and the municipality was good, they indicated instances where the municipal officials did not inform them about development proposals made about the traditional council areas. As an example to this, traditional leaders cited the installation of network aerial where no consultation was done with traditional leaders even though they are responsible for the areas being developed.

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In addition to this, tools that are generated by municipality for land use planning and management are often done without meaningful participation of other stakeholders including the community. The use of the phrase ‘buy-in’ dominates the community participation discourses about the tools used to deal with land. This approach is top-down, and lacked any meaningful community participation and people on the ground do not like this approach. vi.

The role of Technology in the implementation of LUMS Technical support to traditional council is important for sustainable spatial planning and land allocation. This section outlines the existing systems and procedures available to traditional council, one of which is the Geographic Information System (GIS). Unfortunately at Nkandla, this facility is not being optimally utilised despite its efficacy. Reasons for this are multifaceted, ranging from the fact that although GIS is available, it is not updated due to the unavailability of a GIS person responsible for its administration and data capturing.

It was further reported that for an effective land use management particularly in a town, there is a need for a building control officer to be appointed to control and monitor the quality of building structures that are set up for various uses. It was recommended that if this could not be done at a municipal level, this officer may be provided at least at a district level within a shared-service in order to assist the local municipality. This would address the existence of Illegal buildings in Nkandla town for which the municipality has limited information and authority to assess and remove.

The GIS as a tool that captures and store geographical data makes it easier for land use purposes to recognise areas that have been set aside for various land uses. It is critical for the integration of various plans from various traditional councils and municipality to address difficulties related to duplications and parallel land use planning. That is why the availability and the utilisation of this technology is important.

vii.

Conclusions: Implications for Policy and Practice Community participation is a crucial element for ensuring LUMS responsiveness to dealing with land under traditional authorities; ensuring that issues of fragile and threatened ecosystems and tourism industry are properly addressed; ensuring that procedures and technical support that is provided is useful for spatial planning and land allocation, and also that any challenge that obstructs the realisation of the above-mentioned issues are removed. There is evidence that some of these issues have been or are being addressed, but some remain problematic within Nkandla Municipality. The Nkandla town requires development and rehabilitation, which will need a buy-in from local business vendors to ensure success to this process, community participation must be emphasised and promoted. Municipal officials have suggested that to improve this process, key members of the community must be invited and the time of meetings must be set in such a way that it accommodates all relevant classes of people. Responsiveness of LUMS in this area is dependent on the people being fully conversant with land issues and also in them being fully confident that their individual and collective voices underpin spatial planning processes being undertaken. The contention is that all issues raised in this section cohere around genuine community participation in all aspects of LUMS in the municipality

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas Community members are concerned that issues of sensitivity towards their cultural practices are still lacking on the side of the municipality. For partnership between traditional leadership and municipality to succeed, it is critical that guidelines to facilitate collaboration are formulated and formalised in order to ensure effective land use implementation. Traditional leadership has expressed the view that although they are directly responsible for the majority of land under their authority, ward councillors and municipalities do not treat them with respect they deserve. For example, they still think that land use issues remain an exclusive municipality’s domain, and traditional leadership plays a junior partner role. Such views have had negative effects for practice in terms of land use planning and management.

On the practical side of LUMS implementations, it is imperative that areas identified for development and captured in the GIS or maps, are shared by both structures, and are kept by both municipality and traditional leaders viii.

Recommendations for Change Recommendations for change that are made in this section are based on the findings and on the suggestions made by the informants. In addition, these recommendations are underpinned by one key concept, namely, community participation in land use planning and management processes.

There needs to be a serious and genuine rethinking about what this concept means, and how it can shape and facilitate successful engagements in ensuring successful implementation of land use management tools. Perhaps there is a need to view municipality not as a separate structure but as encompassing everybody within it. Therefore community participation processes need to be broadly conceptualised, and be as inclusive as possible, and not imposed from above. In short, this new thinking about participation needs to view municipality as embedded in the local communities.

It has been acknowledged by the municipality that land use planning processes were undertaken at Nkandla. It has also emerged that the role of indigenous knowledge system is crucial in ensuring that land use planning and management tools are sensitive to the people on the ground, and that local knowledge is useful to provide guidelines on traditional ways to dealing with land. This knowledge is often overlooked by most consultants commissioned to develop guiding documents for LUMS and SDFs, and this has resulted in these documents being unresponsive to people’s development needs.

Furthermore, it is recommended that the municipality should work closely with traditional leadership in preparing guidelines that will assist in addressing sensitive cultural aspects affecting land use. It is recommended that for effective and efficient implementation of LUMS in rural areas such as Nkandla, spatial data available in the form of GIS maps, is shared and kept by both traditional leadership and municipal structures. In keeping with the international trends and standards, the current status of GIS tools used in the municipality must be improved to align with the latest approaches to GIS, which include Community-Integrated Geographical Information System (CIGIS).

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CHAPTER 4: THE NATURE OF LAND USE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS IN RURAL AREAS 1.

Introduction

Land use planning and management in South Africa has been bedevilled by tensions between policy intents, unresponsive tools generated, resultant imbalanced practice and the uneven experience that rural communities have had in the process. Discussion of this is done here drawing from the conceptual framework, literature and the experience of three municipalities serving rural communities, as well as from conversations with senior officials at the districts and provincial levels in KwaZulu-Natal. Conceptually, the discourse of land use management revolves around government seeking to influence ways in which land is used through development planning and control. This stance totally disregards the already established influences on how people use and manage their relationship to, and uses of, land. The whole conception of land use planning and management unveils some kind of government’s hegemony over land use issues at the expense of the people who ironically should be driving the government’s vision vis á vis land use issues. The government’s stance seems to be premised on the assumption that its influence supersedes that of indigenous knowledge systems that exist in municipalities and communities. This is contrary to deliberative democracy that seeks to ensure that policy provisions are responsive to, and are in the best interest of all citizens.

People in rural areas have various conceptions of ‘poverty’ and ‘rurality’. Their conceptions of poverty often refer to degrees of poverty, its visibility, the forms that it takes, and the emotions and a sense of self-worth associated with it (Nelson Mandela Foundation, 2005). The conceptions of rurality, just like poverty, vary and they often have both positive and negative connotations. Furthermore, it has been argued that these conceptions of poverty and rurality point to diverse ways in which people experience poverty and the relationship this experience has on how they conceptualise, receive and participate in development of their communities (Mbokazi & Bhengu, 2010). While these people often highlight isolation, vulnerability, and lack of opportunities that characterise their plight, they are also mindful of the need for self-reliance, a sense of community and a commitment to traditional values (Nelson Mandela Foundation, 2005).

Thus people’s combined conceptions of poverty and rurality reveal a sense of rural identity that shows strong and complex connections with their indigenous knowledge systems and traditional ways of life. People in rural areas have a particular relationship to land and the ways in which they plan and manage their land are largely informed by local culture and tradition rather than official documents. This explains the frustrations in implementing tools that are not responsive to this reality. While the ways in which people perceive their conditions have implications for how they conceptualise their development and participate therein for sustainability purposes, policy provisions and guidelines often demonstrate limited regard for this. As a result policy intents are often not in line with practice; hence a policy conundrum that has been an issue in South Africa for years, which has put rural communities at a disadvantage in terms of benefiting from policy provisions. Techniques used in rural areas such as the Participatory Rural Appraisal have not managed to incorporate local knowledge in the process of formulating responsive tools though they are advocated for a commitment beyond mere consultation with the community. A continued lack of participation signifies a need to review participatory approach in planning tools to achieve development of innovative and sustainable solutions (Peacock, 2002).

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas 2.

Realities of Land Use, Planning and Management in Rural Areas

Within the context of wall-to-wall municipal arrangement, land use planning and management has been a challenge in rural areas because the tools prepared to do this were often incompatible with the life circumstances and conditions in these areas. The Toolkit that seeks to address this challenge has been developed as part of this project. Such a Toolkit provides guidelines to generate land use planning and management tools that are responsive to rural communities. Working within social constructivism paradigm, it was argued that the realities for land planning and management in rural areas are socially constructed through underpinning ideologies dominant in these areas and people’s commitment to social transformation. There are unique land uses in rural areas that need to be properly catered for in planning regulations. These include livestock-related uses (amakhaphelo, amadlelo, and izinkambu), agricultural uses (amasimu, and izivande, etc), environmentally sensitive uses (amahlathi emvelo –indigenous forest, iziphethu, imithombo, and amagquma), and recreational uses (izigcawu), lightening-prone areas (izishozi). There are also indigenous minerals such as imicako, ubumba, and ibomvu that need to be considered and accommodated in land use planning and management for economic purposes. Indigenous minerals have been neglected and ignored in municipal plans, and this undermines economies of scale in rural areas.

Land use planning and management tools available in different municipalities to deal with land in rural areas often ignore unique land uses and traditional ways of managing them, and thus are incompatible with the life circumstances and conditions in these areas. In three municipalities that participated in the study, there is uneven availability of spatial planning tools, such as IDPs, LUMS and Land Use Schemes, SDF, and GIS tools.

There are no LUMS in two of these municipalities though funds were provided to prepare them, and in the one that has LUMS available, this tool is not responsive. The evidence for this, are the conflicts between the municipality and the community concerning IDP processes and development projects that are seen as not sensitive to socio-cultural factors.

In addition, some of the supporting documents used in land use planning and management are unresponsive to rural areas needs. For example, the Ingonyama Trust Board forms are technical and inaccessible in the language of the community and this compromises the facilitation of land allocation in traditional council areas.

Though in an earlier study on planning in different socio-cultural contexts, an informant within the Trust indicated that there were processes to translate the forms into the language of the communities, the informant in the current study did not confirm this. In fact, he contradicted this fact, arguing that most people in rural areas understand English, and therefore that language was not a major concern. In the context of high illiteracy rates in most traditional council areas, the accessibility of forms in the language of these communities is imperative.

In the absence of proper and integrated guidelines on land allocation, as well as user-friendly forms, traditional councils use their discretion. Land allocation must be a carefully coordinated process with all stakeholders involved. This is urgent given the experience in Jozini and Mandeni where uncoordinated processes have resulted in human settlements located on hazardous sites, and those sites previously designated for other important uses, such as sports and recreation.

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The seasonality of some of the land uses that exist in rural areas is also ignored in the spatial planning tools.

Indigenously designated areas such as amakhaphelo (winter grazing land), amadlelo (summer grazing land) and izinkambu (all seasons grazing land) were clearly identified in the case study communities. Some of these are shown above in the community profile maps provided for each community. Land use planning and management in rural areas needs to properly identify and geo-reference these uses and to continually facilitate a dialogue between the relevant stakeholders about planning regulations and the dynamics involved in dealing with the unique and seasonal land uses characterising these areas. Rural areas are not homogeneous in terms of the local values and indigenous knowledge informing land uses in general and settlement patterns in particular. For instance there are different preferences in dealing with land related to burial and agricultural practices. Some will prefer common cemetery while others prefer household-based graves. Agricultural preferences include household-based gardens, individual gardens on communal land, and community gardens.

Therefore it is imperative that land use planning and management tools used are responsive to their uniqueness, promote sustainability and are easily accessed by people at various level of literacy within wall-to-wall municipal arrangements.

3.

Policy Landscape and Implication for Practice in LUMS

The landscape of policy in South Africa has serious implications for practice, especially because it is underpinned by ideologies that often do not promote the understanding of the importance of human factor within processes. Tools have been prepared with limited regard of people for which the plans are made. Commitments are on the tools rather than the people, and this is seen clearly in the Municipal Systems Act of 2000 and the KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Act of 2008.

The portrayal of the IDP in the Municipal Systems Act of 2000 ignores communities’ perspectives and their indigenous knowledge, because it assumes a certain level of homogeneity of municipal jurisdiction attributing the council as the brains of these communities. There is no depth in, and meaningful commitment to, interactive practice towards identification of those communities which do not have access to basic municipal services. Prescriptions about alignment with national and provincial sectoral plans introduce a dynamic that does not favour bottom-up approach to planning. The KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Act (No.6 of 2008) is no different.

Though the first assertions of the KZNPDA seem conscious of equitability of citizens while also purporting to ‘take care of diversity within some kind of a uniform approach’, it is unclear about how this is to be done –both conceptually and practically –given that that there is very little mention of the urban-rural differentiation made throughout this law. Section 5 of the KZNPDA which deals with contents of schemes begins to be quite explicit about the lead role of the municipality in land use management, especially in regulations or control of schemes (see Section 5 (d) (ii)). However, the role of communities in the process is left at the mercy of the municipalities, who invariably have no proper mechanisms to facilitating meaningful participation towards a bottom-up approach to planning. There is no clear consideration of the two-way process of learning that needs to happen between the municipality and the communities, especially the rural communities.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas Provincial guidelines that drive the process of producing spatial planning tools in municipalities are problematic in KZN and beyond. While some of these acknowledge the need to deepen democracy and complement the training of planners to enhance their usefulness in preparing the tools, they continue to demonstrate weakness in terms of understanding the sociology of planning and the need to promote and incorporate local knowledge in planning processes. The acknowledgment of key stakeholders, such as the traditional leadership and other role players in development planning, is often not adequately dealt with in the guidelines. This weakness and oversight illuminates the perspective of government that is pretentious in ensuring that all South African citizens enjoy the benefits of democracy and human rights. Failure to generate provincial guidelines that are balanced and responsive to uniformity and diversity in various municipalities is the result of uneven and imbalanced experience of development planning in society. This requires that issues of diversity be taken into serious considerations. To do this, questions such as what does a ‘uniform’ approach within ‘diversity’ means in terms of a land use management, and how this can include an area-based approach to LUMS, are imperative to reform policy. The current policy climate promoting uniformity fails to address diversity adequately, and responsive amendments are necessary.

As a result, even the basic conception of land use from the point of view of communities in line with the indigenous characterisation is still an issue. In some cases issues related to the changing nature of rural and urban settings need attention. It is not clear that the period of five years, which can be extended, which the municipalities are given to propound the Act is given in recognition of the need for this two-way learning process and to take into account the diversity that is featured quite early in the Act. However there is a clever way in which the Act purports to deal with some grey area issues that would otherwise have ‘clouded’ the necessary directive and simple language of policy in the Act. This is through formulation of norms and standards.

The critical issue for practice within a rural context, still rooted in cultural practices, is at what point culture takes precedence over policy. Most rural communities lead their lives without any consideration for policy, not because they are unaware of policy, but because they have a way of life that exists with little perceived need for policy controls. However, the advantage to this challenge is that culture tends to be negotiated if proper community participation platforms are created. Therefore, there is a room for complementarity between culture and policy if all stakeholders, including both the custodians of culture and beneficiaries of culture, participate and shape all the decisions on land use and management.

4.

Technological Support of LUMS

The use of technology in LUMS was examined in relation to the GIS as a system that entails machine (software and hardware), data (spatial information), and people (experts). The limitation with this system is that sometimes experts are unavailable in terms of GIS operators, there is over-reliance on experts to the exclusion of grassroots people, and there is partially accurate spatial information, which characterises the quality of support available for land-related decision makers in rural areas. The recent body of literature highlights the use of community-integrated GIS with concepts such as power sharing, the use of situated knowledge and democratising spatial data. Countries such as the Cameron, Mozambique, Egypt, Japan, Nepal, China, and the United States have taken advantage of the applied sociological approach to GIS where local knowledge and the expert GIS technical data is integrated using traditional mapping methods.

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Only recently in South Africa, has the use of community-integrated GIS methods been minimally evident in Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal rural areas. Contrary to the perception of public servants that integrating local knowledge with academic knowledge is a costly exercise, literature points out that this approach can be cost effective (Chirowodza, Van Royen, Joseph, Sikotoyi, Richter, & Coates, 2009; Weiner & Harris, 2003). The entire system in South Africa remains far behind in terms of aligning with international trends, because it has not moved to embracing the latest concepts such as Community-Integrated Geographical Information System (CIGIS) and its related concepts. Internationally, there is a move in GIS tools within spatial planning towards combining local knowledge with academic knowledge in order to facilitate sustainable development programmes. This is done to democratise spatial data, properly geo-referencing indigenous lands within agreed upon indigenous zoning principles. Such a democratisation of spatial data would enhance the effective and efficient use of maps to support municipalities and traditional councils in land use planning and management processes that are responsive to unique needs of rural communities. It is the absence of these ideas in the current practice that the tools for land use planning and management available to traditional councils remain unresponsive to rural areas.

Drawing from these trends, the current status of GIS system used in the municipality may be improved to ensure its relevance and responsiveness to conditions of land use planning and management in rural areas. The system needs to integrate local knowledge in traditional council areas to ensure a well coordinated management of land use by officials, councillors, traditional leaders and communities in rural communities.

5.

Institutional Linkages in LUMS

The experience of land use planning and management in rural areas indicates that there is a correlation between institutional linkages and community participation. Institutional linkages are crucial for making community participation work, and most inconsistencies and mismanagement of land found in rural areas are linked to weakness in linkages among various institutions that make land-related decisions. It should be noted that spatial planning decisions are not about tools or plans themselves, but are about people. This human factor can be adequately catered for by ensuring the proper linkage among all stakeholders involved.

Synergistic partnership has been established in two municipalities that participated in the study, but was not working effectively, because of poor commitment of parties involved. In the third municipality, the working relationship between traditional leadership and municipalities was achieved without the formal structure of a synergistic partnership. This means that the structure of a synergistic partnership is not an answer on its own, but it is the commitment of people involved in the structure that matters. In addition, deeper understanding of traditional processes related to land planning and management was also found to be an important factor in ensuring proper working relations between municipalities and traditional leadership with or without a formal synergistic partnership structure.

Linkages between municipal-based stakeholders and those in other levels such as district, province and national are crucial in ensuring accountability, as well as efficient monitoring and evaluation of spatial planning tools. Weak institutional linkages are to blame for experiences such as double land allocation, clashing development plans, and unnecessary delays in land management processes. Protocol for a synergistic partnership must specify LUMS procedures that are inclusive of both traditional councils and the municipality. The planning aspect of this synergy must include proper management of this protocol.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas 6.

Community Participation: Deliberative or Pretence?

The experience of community participation is examined in three municipalities of KwaZulu-Natal. The crosscase analysis of the experience of these communities indicate that community participation means different things to different people and stakeholders often practice it differently in different contexts. This depends on people’s orientation towards development and their ideologies about the role that they should play in the process. Philosophical underpinnings of community participation and resultant ideologies have been a reason why platforms created in municipalities are poor and unsustainable. Participation has been reduced to consulting, informing, involving, and obtaining communities’ buy-in on spatial planning tools. These are not always synonymous to meaningful participation. The preoccupation with “involving”, “informing” and “consulting” people in order to get their “buy-in” in ready-made plans –evident in all three selected municipalities –promotes a situation where community participation is no better than imposition.

There is a conceptual difference between ‘participation’ and ‘involvement’ that characterise both the commitment to creating effective platforms and the resultant practice in many municipalities. Understanding such platforms as spaces for informing people about municipal intensions and existing plans towards getting people’s buy-in has undermined the importance of these platforms. There is still a need to upgrade this understanding to seeing such platforms as spaces where all stakeholders and people involved in development may strategically negotiate their vision, outline mission, and draw plans together towards improving development in municipalities.

Most people in three selected communities still felt excluded from land use management and development planning decisions despite being represented in a number of structures, such as Ward Committees, that were created for their inclusion in decision-making processes. This is linked to differences in conceptions of land use management that exist in different society. Platforms for community-based planning are urgently needed in communities where people would be empowered to drive the process. Such platforms remain absent in most communities and in those where these exist, they were found not to be effective.

Community participation is not always in sync with policy intents, and has been uneven for a number of reasons including the inconsistencies in development commitment by stakeholders involved in development. The extent to which community voice permeates policy is central to this. For instance, if pieces of legislation such as the KZNPDA exclude the indigenous conception of LUMS, less room is provided to feature these anywhere, not even in the process for norms and standards. Alignment with national and provincial policies in terms of public and community participation still requires clarity in terms of who is liable for the quality of community participation and whether or not issues of cost and time are considered at the expense of the people who must participate. More importantly it must be clear who must ensure that the community voice is adequately featured in decision-making processes.

Central to this, is the two-way learning process that needs to happen between the formal system and indigenous system in order to avoid mere incorporation of one by the other. Community participation must create a platform where academic knowledge and indigenous knowledge can have a healthy conversation towards developing spatial planning tools that will be relevant, sustainable and responsive to the communities being served. Applied sociology has moved towards opening a disciplinary conversation with planners by suggesting ways in which planners can strengthen their social engagement with the people by considering all social aspects of planning.

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Community participation is sometimes challenged by clashing development plans that powers that be in rural areas have. In Jozini, both the traditional council and municipality had development plans that sometimes clashed and competed in terms of land use planning and management. While this points to the weak linkages between traditional councils and municipality regardless of the existence of the synergistic partnership in the area, platforms to share knowledge about existing development plans between the two structures are crucial to create through a community participation model that would make such platforms sustainable. While putting effective social structures in place remains crucial for facilitating land use planning and management in communities, it was found that this does not always translate to meaningful community participation. In Jozini it was found that both traditional leadership and municipalities are guilty of undermining community participation in land use planning and management. This is linked both to patriarchy that characterises some traditional leadership structures, and to entrenched top-down approaches –mostly perpetrated by guidelines –which municipalities have used in spatial planning for years.

The authoritative voice in decision-making remains centralised even though policies in South Africa claim decentralisation as a democratic commitment. Centralising what is supposed to be decentralised voice is linked to the tendency to prioritise academic voice over the indigenous one. Some planning professionals in one of the three municipalities subscribe to the thinking that for people to participate meaningfully in development, they must have background in town planning. In this view, people are seen as unable to influence decisions about their own development. Such thinking overlooks local knowledge, and thus compromise effective platforms that may be created for community participation. The irony is than traditional councils have big development plans to prove that the traditional community is able to drive its own development. True community participation demands a clear commitment to facilitating free and fair communications among community members and their leadership structures in land management and development provision. Failure to do this amounts to poor or pretentious creation of participation platforms, which compromise democracy in the country.

Community participation has also been examined in terms of who takes what initiative in creating platform for community participation. In one municipality there are two scenarios that present themselves in relation to community participation initiatives. The attitude of municipality towards community participation is in terms of informing the community about the plans and only then to welcome people’s ideas on what they see their role would be in the process. This is a milder form of top down, because it does allow for some local knowledge to shape the development discourse. However, participatory requirements include people’s influence at the conceptualisation phase of creating community participation platform.

Another scenario sees participation as can be initiated or demanded by the community in relation to land use planning and management. This is demonstrated clearly and strongly where the community is able to override the decisions made by powers that be, and can block development initiatives that are considered undesirable and not in the best interest of the community. People here are able to challenge local government on the basis of culture and their awareness of environmental sensitivity of land. IDP processes were suspended in traditional council areas when people demanded that one major development in the area be stopped, and other members of political leadership be removed from office. This experience reveals clashing dispositions between municipality and community regarding their seriousness about community participation.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas Culture, customs and traditions in relation to spatial planning for rural areas are all negotiable within proper platforms and therefore can inform the process of LUMS in these areas. Unfortunately current mechanisms driving community participation are not effective in addressing issues of culture, customs, and beliefs that characterise the life worlds of people in rural areas. If this is done properly, control measures and mechanism thereof may draw from socio-cultural factors, combining and learning from all relevant perspectives at play to formulate and implement LUMS. This will ensure that LUMS is responsive to the socio-cultural contexts of communities being served. Once a community dialogue is done towards constructing a vision for spatial planning, outcomes of the dialogues must democratically inform the geo-referencing of indigenous land allocated for various uses, such that GIS is informed by culture, and thus community-integrated.

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CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSIONS: IMPLICATIONS FOR POLICY AND PRACTICE Tensions between policy and practice, unresponsive tools, imbalanced practice and uneven rural communities’ experience, have characterised land use planning and management in KwaZulu-Natal. Poor land use planning and management have gripped rural areas because the model for land use management system came with very little mechanisms to deal with land under traditional leadership in terms of spheres of communality and indigenous knowledge systems. The toolkit that was produced as part of this project tries to suggest innovative ways in which the land use and management problems can be solved. Therefore, it is inevitable to deal with both changeable and unchangeable scenarios in rural areas within the toolkit.

The portrayal of the IDP in the Municipal Systems Act of 2000 and the KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Act of 2008 both ignore communities’ perspectives and their indigenous knowledge, because they assume a certain level of homogeneity of municipal jurisdiction. There is no depth in, and meaningful commitment to, participatory practice towards the identification of various land use planning and management needs in rural communities. Prescriptions about alignment with national and provincial sectoral plans are not in favour of bottom-up approaches to planning.

While policy intensions relating to community participation have been outlined and further clarified in various documents such as Community Participation Framework and Knowledge Transfer produced by the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, the resultant practice remains disappointing and reveals clashing ideologies. Community participation has been reduced to serving municipal interests such as informing, consulting and getting buy-in from communities on plans they did not partake in their formulation.

This is pretending democracy characterising the manner in which land-related issues are handled in most municipalities in KwaZulu-Natal. A community participation model relevant for rural communities must have clear guidelines on how these communities are accessed through traditional protocols and invited into meaningful development and planning dialogues. It should be these dialogues that give weight to land use planning and management in rural areas.

Although some provincial guidelines for producing spatial planning tools in municipalities acknowledge the need to deepen democracy and complement the training of planners to enhance their usefulness in preparing the tools, they are weak in understanding the sociology of planning that promote the incorporation of local knowledge in planning processes. These guidelines do not adequately acknowledge the key role players in development planning. This weakness and oversight illuminates the perspective of government that is pretentious in ensuring that all South African citizens enjoy the benefits of democracy and human rights. Failure to generate provincial guidelines that are balanced and responsive to uniformity and diversity in various municipalities is the result of uneven and imbalanced experience of development planning in society.

The responsiveness of LUMS or whatever tool used to deal with land use planning and management in rural areas requires a variety of considerations, which have been overlooked by policy and planning regulations.

These considerations range from the philosophical underpinnings of LUMS and responsiveness thereof to how these can work within the context of wall-to-wall municipal arrangements in rural communities. This debate must capture both the current realities of unresponsiveness of LUMS and possibilities for change in relation to land use planning and management in rural areas. This must be done with due caution because government processes such as the land use model and the very demarcation process that resulted in the current cadastral arrangement, are facilitated through a top-down approach, and that in itself was not sensitive to socio-cultural factors of land use planning and management.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas There are unique land uses in rural areas that need to be properly catered for, but these have been neglected by planning regulations. These land uses include livestock-related uses (amakhaphelo, amadlelo, and izinkambu), agricultural uses (amasimu, and izivande, etc), environmentally sensitive uses (amahlathi emvelo –indigenous forest, iziphethu, imithombo, and amagquma), and recreational uses (izigcawu), dangerous uses (izishozi). Rural communities are also endowed with indigenous minerals such as ubumba, imicako, and ibomvu. These are crucial for rural economies, but have been neglected in planning regulation.

The concept of seasonal land use exists in rural areas and must be understood and catered for in spatial planning tools. Livestock land uses such as amakhaphelo (winter grazing land), amadlelo (summer grazing land) and izinkambu (all seasons grazing land) were clearly identified in the case study communities. Spatial planning in rural areas needs to properly identify these uses and maintain them through facilitating proper dialogue with the relevant stakeholders about planning regulations and dynamics involved in dealing with them.

Rural areas are heterogeneous in terms of the local values and indigenous knowledge informing land uses in general and settlement patterns in particular and there are different preferences in dealing with land related to burial and agricultural practices. Therefore it is imperative that spatial planning tools used are responsive to their uniqueness, promote sustainability and are easily accessible to all citizens at various level of literacy within wall-to-wall municipal arrangements.

Most problems related to dealing with land in rural areas are linked to weaknesses in linkages among various institutions that make decisions on land. Though synergistic partnerships have been formed in at least two of the selected municipalities, they were not working properly. Weak institutional linkages are to blame for problems related to land allocation, clashing development plans, and unnecessary delays in land management processes. Therefore, protocol for a synergistic partnership must specify LUMS procedures that are inclusive of both traditional councils and the municipality. The planning aspect of this synergy must include proper management of this protocol.

Limitations in the use of technology in LUMS were found in the selected municipalities. Sometimes GIS specialists were unavailable to enable the GIS system to be fully operational. There was over-reliance on experts in generating spatial data to the exclusion of grassroots people. Spatial information at district and local levels were partially accurate. Unfortunately, all these point to the quality of support available for land-related decision makers in rural areas. In South Africa, the entire system is far behind in relation to international trends, because it has not moved to embracing the latest concepts such as Community-Integrated Geographical Information System (CIGIS), participatory GIS, power-sharing in GIS, and community self-definition through GIS. It is for these reasons that tools for land use planning and management available to traditional councils remain unresponsive to rural areas. The current status of GIS tools used in the municipality must be improved to align with the latest international approaches to GIS, i.e. CIGIS. The GIS system needs to integrate local knowledge in traditional council areas to ensure coordinated management of land use by officials, councillors and traditional authorities in rural communities.

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CHAPTER 6: RECOMMENDATIONS FOR EFFECTING CHANGE 1.

National Level Practitioners

At the national and provincial levels, policies must ensure that tools for land use management systems are beneficial to communities by ensuring that these are prepared in a participatory manner that seriously takes into the indigenous knowledge. Municipalities should prepare and implement such tools with full and meaningful participation of all communities concerned through deliberative democracy. Central to this, is establishing realistic community visions and mission statements that would inform the preparation of responsive tools for land use planning and management in order to cater for people’s needs at various levels of age, language and education as well as their aspirations for the future.

Mechanisms for the careful consideration of the social logics that are informed by indigenous knowledge systems and shape the spatial planning discourses and practices in communities are crucial for developing platforms for institutional linkages and community participation. Those social logics that appear to undermine the social justice that put people first should be challenged at all levels of policy formulation and implementation. Plans and tools must not be sustained at the expense of the people, if they are meant to better the lives of the people. It is the responsibility of all spheres of government to ensure that the dignity of the people and their ways of life is restored and protected. Recommendations for the relevant national level practitioners are outlined below. a.

National Planning Commission The National Planning Commission seeks to provide leadership, management and development of the strategic agenda of government in line with Batho Pele principles of accountability, responsiveness, justice and equality, among others (www.thepresidency.gov.za). Its strategic objectives include coordinating, monitoring and communicating government policies and programmes; enhancing the integrated approach to governance for accelerated service delivery and bringing government closer to the people (www.thepresidency.gov.za).

It is recommended that the Commission should use the relevant sector departments concerned to create mechanisms that are responsive to all communities, taking seriously the issues of uniqueness and diversity in South Africa. These mechanisms should be formulated in such a way that they are responsive to the different planning and development needs of communities in the country. Working closely with the Departments of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Rural Development and Land Reform, Water and Environmental Affairs, the Commission should ensure that the capacity -building programmes for municipalities in South Africa are effective and are putting people first.

Furthermore, the mechanism that are used to coordinate, monitor and communicate government policies should also take into consideration diversities in terms of language, access to information –including policy information, as well as −, current levels of policy and human rights awareness that exist in communities. Public policy dialogues to enhance responsiveness of planning policies should be conducted with all policy-makers, and people’s participation in such dialogues should be properly ensured.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas b.

Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (COGTA) COGTA has a clear mandate to develop appropriate policies and legislation to promote integration in the government’s development programmes and service delivery; providing strategic interventions, support and partnerships to facilitate policy implementation in the provinces and local government; and to create enabling mechanisms for communities to participate in governance in line with Batho Pele principles (www.thedplg.gov.za).

Some of the strategic objectives include building and enhancing the governance system for the purposes of enabling sustainable development and service delivery; building and strengthening capacity and the accountability of provinces and municipalities to enable them to implement their constitutional mandate; to monitor, evaluate and communicate the impact of government programmes in municipal areas in order to enhance performance, accountability and public confidence; to oversee the implementation of the intergovernmental programmes of support to the institutions of Traditional Leadership, to enable them to perform their constitutional mandate (www.thedplg.gov.za).

It is recommended that the current mechanisms used by COGTA to promote integration in development programmes be strengthened through ensuring effective institutional linkages among key role players in development planning at municipal level. This can be achieved by a set of clear guidelines that assist municipalities to deal effectively with diverse socio-cultural contexts of communities in various municipalities in South Africa. Such mechanisms should enable municipalities to take seriously and incorporate indigenous knowledge into academic knowledge that often drive spatial planning within a wall-to-wall municipal arrangements in the country.

The mechanisms that are used to monitor and evaluate the impact of programmes to municipalities should be reviewed to ensure relevance, efficiency, accountability and responsiveness. Our study shows that community voices are still largely undermined and ignored during IDP processes, and other spatial planning decision-making processes. Therefore the current platform that has been created to promote community participation should be reviewed and modified to ensure that the process becomes more democratic and socially just. The accessibility of supporting documents facilitating land allocation in traditional council areas should be made user-friendly to community members at various language competencies and policy awareness levels.

COGTA should also collaborate with Department of Rural Development and Land Reform and liaise with Ingonyama Trust Board to ensure that proper systems for land use management involve traditional councils and communities, and that province specific frameworks of co-operations between local government and traditional leadership are formulated.

c.

Department of Human Settlements The Department of Human Settlements is mandated to establish and facilitate a sustainable process that provides equitable access to adequate housing for all within the context of affordability of housing, services and access to social amenities and economic opportunities (www.housing.gov.za). It also seeks to provide a wide choice of housing and tenure in order to promote an economically, fiscally, socially and financially viable and sustainable integrated development planning process (www.housing.gov.za).

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In delivering on its mandate, particularly in providing low-cost housing in rural communities, the Department must consider the community’s skills, cultural values and socio-cultural factors. Socio-cultural norms and values determine who should get a house, at what age and under what conditions. They also create a certain kind of rigidity in people’s relationship to land allocated to them for settlements. Once there are household graveyards, people tend to be inflexible and to reject development initiatives that require them to relocate, regardless of how much they need such development.

It is important to create a space for dialogue with communities on issues such as: under whose name is the family given a house; the range of possible house designs; the location of houses within household plots; and the type of tenure and sustenance of the house that is possible to people whose survival sometimes involves high mobility for economic reasons. In such a dialogue both planners and communities have to understand the socio-cultural and logistical imperatives and limitations within which they operate. Therefore, proper mechanism are needed to ensure sustainable housing delivery, and these must bring about a healthy conversation between constitutional provisions and people’s cultural customs, values and beliefs. d.

Department of Rural Development and Land Reform The Department of Rural Development and Land Reform seeks to facilitate the integrated development and social cohesion through participatory approaches, in partnership with all sectors of society as it envisions vibrant, equitable and sustainable rural communities (www.dla.gov.za). In fulfilling this mandate, the Department has a challenge, because participatory approaches have been superficial in dealing with rural communities that are still grappling with poor education, employment, and literacy levels, as well as poor levels of awareness relating to issues of HIV/AIDS, and policy provisions.

In close collaboration with the COGTA and the Department of Water and Environmental Affairs, the mechanisms to achieve this mandate should be reviewed and strengthened, especially those relating to the institutional mechanisms for decision-making on LUMS. Because of the link between land allocation issues and land use management in rural areas, clear mechanism is needed to deal with this link to promote better land reform in the country.

One goal of land restitution is to facilitate development initiatives by bringing together all stakeholders relevant to land claim. Therefore in order to address the delays in this process, policy amendments where necessary and awareness campaigns must be conducted.

2.

Provincial Level Practitioners

a.

KwaZulu-Natal Department of Cooperative Government and Traditional Affairs (KZNCOGTA) The KZNCOGTA has been appointed to promote people-centred, sustainable local governance, which focuses on effective service delivery and that is responsive to the needs of the communities to ensure sustainable communities (www.kzncogta.gov.za). The test to this mandate is the different socio-cultural strongholds and indigenous knowledge systems that characterise communities in KwaZulu-Natal.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas The Department should ensure that government officials are adequately equipped and made aware of, and know how to deal with, socio-cultural realities that exist in rural areas. This will mean that the land use management systems (LUMS) are not just an extension of the urban planning processes in rural contexts, but would blend in with the indigenous knowledge systems in communities. There is a need for empowerment workshops to build the capacity of planning professionals and all stakeholders involved in indigenous knowledge systems. In addition, two-way learning may be enhanced through conducting culturally-sensitive workshops with the traditional leadership and communities on spatial planning tools.

The Department must revise its guiding documents and create proper monitoring mechanisms to ensure that spatial planning tools used in different communities are informed by diversity in terms of language dialects and cultural orientations that exist in communities for better accessibility. The current status of GIS tools used in municipalities must be improved to align with the latest international approaches to GIS, i.e. CIGIS. The GIS system needs to integrate local knowledge in traditional council areas to ensure coordinated management of land use by officials, councillors and traditional authorities in rural communities. This will ensure that these tools are responsive to the needs of the people in all socio-cultural contexts. b.

KwaZulu-Natal Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (RDLR) The KZNRDLR strives to provide enhanced land rights to all South Africans, − particularly black people who were previously disadvantaged in terms of access to land, for the purposes of increasing −, to increase income levels and job opportunities, and to provide a productive land use and well-planned human settlements (www.pwv.gov.za).

In collaboration with relevant statutory bodies such as the Ingonyama Trust and in creating proper institutional linkages, the Department should strive to expedite the process of land restitution, as communities that participated in the study were concerned about long delays in the processing of land claims.

There is also a need to find land restoration methodologies that are not divisive between communities or community structures, as has been observed in the relationships between traditional leadership and community property associations.

The Department has a challenge to create an understanding of the socio-historical basis for Black and White communities to redress past injustices which resulted in imbalances in access to land. Current policies and current practical approaches towards this objective must be reviewed. Furthermore as one of the cases illustrate in this study, there is a need to build a firmer relationship between land restitution beneficiaries and local government.

As part of ensuring well-planned human settlements, the Department should consider the different cultural norms, and values associated with traditional human settlements patterning. This can be done by ensuring that its strategies of engaging with diverse communities are informed by the communities’ socio-cultural profiles. Planning should be rooted mostly in bottom-up approaches, which at present do not seem to be the case.

c.

Ingonyama Trust Board The Ingonyama Trust Board (ITB) is mandated to improve the quality of life of the people living on Ingonyama Trust land by ensuring that the land usage is to their benefit and in accordance with the laws of the land (www.ingonyama.gov.za). In carrying out its mandate, the Trust provides an effective land administration system and extends security of tenure in accordance with both customary and statutory law (www.ingonyama.gov.za).

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Contrary to the Trust’s claim of providing an effective land administration system to the tribal trust communities, our study shows that this system is characterised by applicants’ inability to follow the processes through (e.g. even to complete the ITB forms), because of poor guidance during the process of applying, as well as the technicality and inaccessibility of forms in the language of the communities.

Incidences of corruption and double land allocation were reported in contexts where both the traditional councils and the Trust were responsible for land administration.

The ITB applications forms should be made less technical and more easily understandable by all parties involved in the application process for land allocation. Clear guidelines should also be formulated on how to complete the forms properly in order to enhance efficiency in the process. Strong institutional mechanisms must be in place in the form of satellite offices of the Ingonyama Trust to bring the Trust closer to the communities it serves and to address the problem of corruption that has been reported as part of the application process.

Moreover the Trust itself must review its role in relation to current development legislation of the province (including the KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Act), especially with reference to its relationship to local government and tenure issues. It also needs to review and resolve issues relating to keeping land economically accessible to rural communities, with considerations of low income as well as lifestyle issues, while encouraging the generation of revenue for municipal services to be rendered.

3.

Local Level Practitioners

a.

District and Local municipalities According to the Municipal Structures Act (No. 117 of 1998), district municipalities in South Africa were established as institutions that would achieve the integrated, sustainable and equitable social and economic development of their area by ensuring integrated development planning. They were also meant to promote bulk infrastructural development and services and building the capacity of local municipalities to enable them to perform their functions and exercise their powers where such capacity was lacking.

It is within this mandate that they promote the equitable distribution of resources between the local municipalities in a particular district. Central to its functions, the Municipal Systems Act (No. 32 of 2000) makes a provision that a district municipality must plan integrated development for the area district in close consultation with the local municipalities in that district. Its integrated development plan has to be aligned with the framework adopted, and it should draft this plan with due consideration of the proposals submitted by all local municipalities.

The success of providing equitable distribution of resources between the district municipality’s local municipalities depends largely on the strength of the IDPs and spatial planning tools in each of those the local municipalities. Therefore it in the best interest of the government and the communities concerned that district municipalities have the necessary mechanisms to ensure that the process of development planning in local municipalities is responsive and adequately supported. Innovative strategies to ensure that local municipality IDPs reflect the socio-cultural profiles of all the communities in each municipality are needed to ensure that the development planning is relevant to the people to which it is concerned.

This can happen only if those entrusted with planning responsibilities are genuinely committed to ensuring meaningful community participation in planning processes.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas The study found that there are indigenous standards that are used in decision-making on land issues, and these exist but are ignored by planning practitioners. These standards should be incorporated to the formal ones adopted by various planning practitioners in the public sector. Community participation continues to be problematical in various local municipalities, because the voices of the people being serviced are ignored. The district municipalities should find ways to solve this concern, because it undermines the democratic nature of spatial planning in communities. One of the ways could be to establish strong institutional mechanisms to monitor and evaluate IDP processes in all local municipalities, as well as to establish effective capacity-building programmes to support these municipalities.

While it is legislated that a local municipality must align its IDP within the set framework and must draft its IDP documents taking into consideration the proposal submitted to it by the district municipality, this process should be bottom-up. Proposals must be drawn from the communities themselves, taking into account the indigenous knowledge systems that exist in them. Activists of a bottom-up approach to community development argue that local knowledge, culture, resources, skills, and processes should be valued and all these must be allowed to inform the spatial planning processes (Tesoriero & Ife, 2006).

Mechanisms to promote a bottom-up approach to community planning and development should be established and sustained at district and local municipality levels to ensure that communities benefit from the process.

Therefore, at community level, municipalities should collaborate with communities and relevant stakeholders to devise clear mechanisms and strategies that would enhance people’s involvement at all stages of spatial planning. Furthermore, in order to strengthen community participation at various phases of planning, the spatial planning tools should be published not only in the language of the community, but also be made less technical in form and structure for easy accessibility so that they can be understood by people at different ages and levels of age and literacy. b.

Local Communities A limitation of the study was that it examined only three rural community contexts, excluding numerous other contexts where planning occurs. However, these three contexts provided some ideas on how these communities experienced spatial planning within their given contexts that are largely characterised by indigenous knowledge.

Community participation in spatial planning has been characterised by informing, consulting, and involving people only to get their buy-in in ready-made plans, and this does not translate to meaningful participation at all. The tendency to sensationalise academic knowledge and make it an excuse for not creating a platform for all community members at different class and literacy levels is unacceptable. Some community members are well aware of their right to demand participation and have used this power to block developments that were deemed insensitive to culture and not in the best interest of the people in rural areas.

Institutional linkages between traditional leadership –identified as custodians of culture by the Constitution –and local government are still weak in rural areas, and these needs to be strengthen. While it is the role of government to create platforms where these can be strengthen, the onus still reside with community stakeholders to make this work. In contexts where the working relationship between municipalities and traditional leadership was reasonably stronger, it was found that municipalities had used proper protocols to engage with traditional councils.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas 4.

Multi-Sectoral Collaboration

The recommendations here are directed to structures that exist to pull together various government departments and stakeholders outside government. Such networks can be mobilised and their efforts enhanced to support the generation of land use planning and management tools that are responsive to unique and diverse needs of all communities. Government and civil society must form strong networks and partnerships to ensure that municipalities are adequately supported in spatial planning. Among other strategies that can be established, collaborative efforts must be made to ensure full participation of community leadership –traditional councils and municipalities –community members and sector departments in spatial planning processes.

There is a need to reinforce the traditional values and social fabrics of Ubuntu/Botho so as to facilitate responsive land use planning and management processes at government and community levels. The government policies and regulation as formulated by various departments must be able to respond to all challenges of dealing with land in rural communities, through taking into account the socio-cultural factors that surround this phenomenon. Once their responsiveness to socio-cultural factors is ascertained, the existing policies that address spatial planning must be implemented and monitored more stringently, with clear mechanism to incorporate indigenous knowledge of people in the grassroots.

The toolkit established as part of this project indicates that a multi-sectoral collaboration can provide a strategic forum where land use planning and management issues can be deliberated on to support decision making on land at various levels.

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Land Use Management Systems in Rural Areas NOTES

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