Development of strategic management framework for communal property association in South Africa

Abstract

Communal Property Associations (CPAs) in South Africa came into being as a strategy for the restitution of land under the land reform program post-1994. The aim was to administer and manage land returned to beneficiaries under the land reform restitution program to enhance the livelihood of beneficiaries. Despite this noble initiative, rural communities that are beneficiaries of land restitution cannot improve their livelihoods as envisaged and are unable to maintain productivity on the returned land managed under CPAs. This study was aimed at developing a Strategic Management Framework (SMF) for South Africa (SA) CPAs. The New Institutional Economic (NIE) theory and the Resource-based theory (RBT) underpin the study. The study adopted a concurrent Mixed-Method approach, and quantitative and qualitative data were collected simultaneously. A semi-structured questionnaire and an interview guide were used for data collection, and the data analysis techniques were descriptive, inferential, and thematic. Data were collected from a total of 272 respondents and randomly selected participants. Findings from the descriptive analysis revealed that the management challenges confronting CPAs were in terms of the level of education amongst beneficiaries, skills levels of beneficiaries, leadership quality of beneficiaries, professionalism, and training opportunities available to beneficiaries. The results also found structural and institutional factors were absent in the existing CPA framework, hence, affecting CPAs viability and sustainability. This study demonstrated that a successful Strategic Management f for CPAs in South Africa is dependent on systematic planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of the strategic goals set by CPAs. The study establishes that there is a need for a proper institutionalization of CPAs in terms of government structures and support, and the absence of a developed strategic management model for the capacitation of CPAs as an institution of government rather than a program with limited support has resulted to the insignificant impact these organisations have made on the livelihood of beneficiaries. The study has developed a strategic management model that may be used to manage CPAs and proposed the correct implementation of the model as a tool to manage CPAs in South Africa. The study concluded that managing CPAs as a program of government rather than managing CPAs as an institution of government is not sustainable, and the current management model needs to be replaced by the one proposed in this study.