Michael Lipton, the great development economist, died a little over a year ago. In the many tributes paid to him, his contributions to land debates were rather underplayed. Along with his 1977 book, Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias and World Development, his book, Land Reform in Developing Countries: Property rights and property wrongs, published in 2009, is a classic.
Michael and I were colleagues at IDS and Sussex, and he thought for a long time that I too was an economist (there weren’t many people who weren’t economists at IDS for the longest time, so a valid mistake!) and he later got to know about our work on land in Zimbabwe. Through Merle, his late wife, he had connections with South Africa and worked closely with the post-apartheid ministries responsible for land reform. In 1996, together with Merle, Frank Ellis and Mike de Klerk, the two volume book series was published, Land, Labour and Livelihoods in Rural South Africa. Sadly, many of these ideas never saw the light of day in the new South Africa – and with the new coalition government are now unfortunately even less likely to.
This article is from Zimbabweland, a blog written by IDS Research Fellow Ian Scoones. Zimbabweland focuses on issues related to rural livelihoods and land reform in Zimbabwe.
