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Rick has over 40 years experience working in the land sector in Southern Africa. He is part of the Land Portal knowledge engagement team working to research and develop knowledge resources including data stories, blogs and in-depth country profiles for Southern, Central and Eastern Africa.
Rick is also a Senior Research Associate with Phuhlisani NPC - a South African land sector NGO and the curator of specialist Southern African land news and analysis website https://knowledgebase.land
He tweets on land related issues Twitter account https://twitter.com/KnowledgebaseL
He has a PhD from the University of Cape Town. His research in Langa, Cape Town features as the central case study in a recent book Urban Planning in the Global South (2018), co-authored with the late Vanessa Watson, which examines the on-going contestations over land and housing in the rapidly growing cities of the global South.
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From illegality to legality: Illegal urban development and the transformation of urban property rights in Lesotho
This paper draws on research on the enforcement of the Land Act of 1979 in Lesotho. It seeks to show that illegal settlements occur under the shadow of formal state rules, from which social actors borrow selectively and in opportunistic ways to acquire urban property rights. This is possible because of inconsistencies and contradictions in state rules and enforcement methods.
Land tenure, housing rights and gender
This document is a chapter in a larger report commissioned by UN habitat to review the laws and land tenure of Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia. The report provides a brief historical background, snapshots of how the government and legal systems operate, reviews land tenure, the various types of land in the country and the relevant constitutional provisions laws and policies. The chapter also examines housing rights and accessibility of services.
The kingdom of Lesotho: Country strategic opportunities programme 2022 2025
This document prepared by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) identifies strategic opportunities with the goal of contributing to the transformation of rural Lesotho towards a more resilient and economically productive environment that allows its population to sustain their livelihoods and overcome poverty and malnutrition. It sets out to identify initiatives which can contribute to inclusive commercialisation of the rural economy and creating an enabling natural and business environment for sustainable and resilient rural transformation.
Gender, authority and the politics of land in Lesotho
This DPhil dissertation explores the logic, methods, and outcomes of a U.S. government- sponsored land reform in Lesotho, Southern Africa. The reform was part of a $363 million grant from the Millennium Challenge Corporation to the Kingdom of Lesotho that funded a sweeping change. Instead of local chiefs administering and allocating land, the power shifted to bureaucrats and landholders, who received leasehold titles to their land.
Mapping for investability: remaking land and maps in Lesotho
Maps are instrumental in the commodification of land and its exchange in markets. The critical cartog- raphy literature emphasizes the ‘‘power of maps” to (re)define property relations through their descrip- tive and prescriptive attributes. But how do maps work to achieve these outcomes? This paper examines the notion of maps as ‘‘inscription devices” that turn land into a commodity that can be bought and sold by investors. It is based on the analysis of a land reform project in the Southern African country of Lesotho.
Development by dispossession: the post-2000 development agenda and land rights in Lesotho
This paper questions the novelty of post-2000 development strategies, in particular the US’s Millennium Challenge Corporation and its ethos of ‘poverty reduction through economic growth.’ Using land as a lens, I explore recent eras of development assistance and ask if the Millennium-era has been appreciably different from pre-2000 development. The backdrop of my study is an MCC-sponsored land reform in Lesotho. I use data drawn from fieldwork in Lesotho to argue that the logics and outcomes of the Development industry’s land policies have remained largely the same.
The Validity and Challenges of the Traditional Chieftaincy in Modern Decentralization or Decentralized Governance for Development (DGD) in Lesotho
The paper discusses chieftaincy and colonialism in Lesotho, institutional roles of chieftaincy, the role of chieftaincy in the era of modern democracy/DGD, the relations between the democratic local authorities and chieftaincy in Lesotho and the role of chieftaincy and its constraints in the decentralized system of Lesotho. The paper directly contributes knowledge in public management sciences and administrative policy systems.
Measuring Gender, Development, and Land: Data-Driven Analysis and Land Reform in Lesotho
Development agencies are increasingly making decisions and evaluating success on the basis of an ever-growing supply of data. Some argue that the proliferation of data improves development outcomes for states and people targeted by agencies' interventions, as well as the accountability of those agencies. Others argue that problems of selection bias, a lack of longitudinal records, and misuse of data can ignore or even exacerbate the problems that development agencies seek to mitigate.
Development, politics and the centralisation of state power in Lesotho, 1960-75
The rhetoric of development served as a language for Sotho politicians from 1960–70 to debate the meanings of political participation. The relative paucity of aid in this period gave outsized importance to small projects run in rural villages, and stood in stark contrast to the period from the mid-1970s onwards when aid became an ‘antipolitics machine’ that worked to undermine national sovereignty.
South African land news #March 2020
Every day since Pres Ramaphosa was elected into office we have searched out South African land-related news which is curated on our website knowledgebase.land. This publication provides a brief summary of land news across a range of categories for March 2020