How do rights become real? Formal and informal institutions in South Africa's land reform

Abstract

How do legally defined rights to resources become effective command over those resources? What are the limits to social change through legal reform? These questions are having to be confronted, often painfully, by rural people and activists and government officials involved in South Africa's post-apartheid land reform, central components of which comprise ambitious and wide-ranging 'rights-based' laws and programs. Two central issues are: supplementing the passing of new legislation with the detailed design of programs to implement these laws, and the interplay of formal and informal institutions in the complex social arenas within which people actually live. The environmental entitlements framework helps us to explore these questions.