Institutional factors in natural resource management in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa - Institutional Constraints to Small Farmer Development in Southern Africa - page 218

medicinal plants and building materials in the Eastern Cape Province, government's
privatisation programmes caused a major threat.
Institutions, according to Vink (1989), have developed in various ways. For instance, there
are those that have developed because of explicit human design and this process is called
'institution building' while other institutions emerged when community representatives
met and negotiated types of institutions they would favour. The supply of these institutional
changes include among others, the cost of collective action or cost of reaching an agreement
that is suitable for members of the community. This, in turn, is determined by factors such
as cultural and traditional knowledge, and equal control among the communities in terms
of decision-making.
To date, no systematic assessment of how these institutions influence the use of rangelands
in the Eastern Cape Province has been conducted especially in the light of the new
arrangements that emerged in the wake of democratic rule in South Africa and the
opening up of the economy to the outside world to which it was closed for many years
under apartheid rule. The conflicts and confusions in land use in this province between
communal and freehold tenure system and the new arrangements introduced to enhance
tenure security need also to be understood. For example, rangelands in the north-eastern
parts and central parts generally are communally owned, while those in the western part
of the province, are largely commercially owned (Hoare, 2002). The present study is an
attempt to put together information about how these different systems interact and what
their impacts have been on the management of natural resources and what the implications
have been for livelihoods in the smallholder agricultural systems of the province.
10.3 Land degradation in the Eastern Cape
According to the Eastern Cape Department of Agriculture (CSIR, 2004), the Eastern
Cape Province is one of the three most degraded provinces in South Africa. During 1988-
98, the area of land used for crops and grazing decreased. Land degradation was among
other contributing factors. Other factors included the droughts of the mid-1980s and
early 1990s, stock theft in the communal areas, increased production costs, lack of support
for communal farmers and the collapse of the agricultural infrastructure (Eastern Cape
Provincial Government, 2006).
Some of the areas with the highest soil degradation include Herschel, Mount Fletcher
and Middledrift. The major contributors in the communal rangelands are deforestation
and loss of vegetative cover from overgrazing and overstocking with livestock. This makes
communal rangelands more degraded than commercial rangelands (Eastern Cape Provincial
Government, 2006).