article · Frontiers in Sustainable Resource Management
Land reform in Southern Africa is frequently viewed merely as a redistributive measure to address past dispossession. This study reviews scholarship and policy documents from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Mozambique to examine land reform across labour regimes, livelihood systems, and knowledge orders. The analysis reveals that current reforms often deracialise land ownership while maintaining paternalistic state control and hierarchical tenure arrangements. Consequently, these initiatives tend to produce fragmented classes of labour and precarious livelihood portfolios rather than secure agrarian livelihoods. Furthermore, land and conservation policies continue to favour Euro-modern epistemologies and fortress conservation models, which marginalise Indigenous Knowledge Systems and communal practices. The work argues that land redistribution without structural changes to labour and knowledge systems risks maintaining historical inequalities, proposing a conceptual framework to guide decolonised policy, sustainable livelihoods, and just transitions.
Land redistribution alone is insufficient to guarantee rural prosperity and fair resource management. By demonstrating how enduring colonial ideologies and conservation models undermine agrarian reforms, this research provides planners, development agencies, and policymakers with a clearer understanding of why reforms falter. It highlights the necessity of integrating local knowledge systems and reforming labour structures to achieve durable, equitable rural development across Southern Africa.
This research is early-stage conceptual and policy analysis rather than a commercial technology. The findings could potentially assist public policy designers, land rights organisations, and rural development consultants in restructuring tenure frameworks and community conservation programmes. However, the abstract outlines a research and policy agenda without indicating any direct commercialisation pathway, market product, or private enterprise application.
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Land reform in Southern Africa is often framed narrowly as a redistributive tool to correct historical dispossession. This article advances a decolonial political economy perspective that conceptualizes land reform as structural reconfiguration across three interlinked domains: labor regimes, livelihood systems, and knowledge/epistemic orders. Using an integrative, theory-informed review of peer-reviewed scholarship and selected policy texts, the study synthesizes literature on land reform trajectories, colonial and post-colonial tenure systems, agrarian change, Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS), and conservation and planning regimes in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Mozambique. The analysis shows that contemporary land reforms operate within enduring colonial land and conservation ideologies, frequently deracialising ownership while reproducing paternalistic state control and hierarchical tenure forms. These reforms generate fragmented classes of labor and hybrid, precarious livelihood portfolios rather than secure agrarian livelihoods. At the same time, land and conservation policies continue to privilege Euro-modern epistemologies and “fortress” conservation, marginalizing indigenous knowledge and communal ontologies, although decolonial and IKS-oriented practices in communal landholding and policy reform reveal countervailing possibilities. The article argues that redistribution without concurrent transformation of labor regimes and knowledge systems risks entrenching the “colonial present.” A conceptual framework is proposed that links land, labor, livelihoods and knowledge to dimensions of agrarian and epistemic justice, and a research and policy agenda is outlined to align land reform with decolonisation, livelihood sustainability and just transitions in Southern Africa.
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DOI: 10.3389/fsrma.2026.1880790
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