Equitable rural socioeconomic change

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Land | Climate dynamics | Technological Innovation More and more of global economic wealth and decision-making power rests with fewer and fewer people, while acute socio-economic inequities continue to afflict large rural communities in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Land inequalities remain a burning question for rural communities. Equitable Rural Socioeconomic Change brings together original reflections on the intricacies of economic and social transformations that are unfolding in the rural areas of developing countries, and provides a fresh and authentic perspective. This compelling book revisits dominant but exhausted conceptions of rural livelihoods to expose their analytical flaws and thematic limitations. In this book, the interacting themes of land, climate dynamics and technological innovation are brought into a coherent whole through a re-examination of the lens of unequal ownership, control and use of a society’s productive means. Equitable Rural Socioeconomic Change is the first multidimensional and integrated analysis of rural socio-economic change anchored around rising structural polarisation in the 21st century.

1. Contextualising socioeconomic change

Peter T Jacobs

PART 1: LABOUR, LAND AND FOOD

2. Improving the quality of work for chronically poor people

Lucy Scott

3. Technical change and labour absorption in large-scale commercial agriculture in South Africa

Ajuruchukwu Obi

4. Support to smallholder farmers in South Africa: Challenges of scale and strategy

Michael Aliber and Ruth Hall

5. Translating farmland redistribution project practices into policy outcomes

Tim GB Hart

6. Farm and non-farm livelihoods in the rural West Coast District, South Africa

Peter T Jacobs and Ephias Makaudze

PART 2: CLIMATE AND ECOLOGICAL DYNAMICS

7. Droughts, floods, carbon footprints and agriculture: The case of South Africa in context

Peter T Jacobs and Rehema Msulwa

8. The trade in Pelargonium sidoides: Rural livelihood relief or bounty for bio-buccaneers?

Jaci van Niekerk and Rachel Wynberg

9. Natural resource pricing and climate change vulnerability: Implications for smallholder development in Africa

Ajuruchukwu Obi and Lily Kisaka

10. Participation of women in smallholder irrigated agriculture in South Africa: Constraints and opportunities

Maxwell Mudhara, Stanley Sharaunga and Sithembile Sinyolo

11. To what extent does conservation benefit local communities?

Melville Saayman, Riaan Rossouw and Andrea Saayman

12. The challenges of climate change and biofuel production in South Africa: The perspectives of smallholder producers

Ephias Makaudze

PART 3: SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION

13. Rural innovation adoption pitfalls: The case of interrupted diffusion of sericulture among Rwandan farmers

Alexis Habiyaremye

14. Social technology and sewage treatment in rural areas of Brazil

Milena Serafim and Rafael Dias

15. Innovation and the dynamics of rural economic development

Lindile L Ndabeni

Peter Jacobs is a research director in the EPD Research Programme of the HSRC. With more than 15 years’ research experience, his research interests include the economics of agrarian change and rural socioeconomic transitions. His publications experience includes co-editing special issues of the academic journals Agrekon (on household food security status) and Development Southern Africa (on sustainable rural development in South Africa).