“TOWARDS A CLIMATE OF CHANGE: Symposium”

In 1996, Elandskloof hit news headlines as the first successful land claim in a newly democratic South Africa. However, over the coming decades, the contradictions in a deeply flawed restitution process came to the fore: land without the capital to develop it, and a group of claimants many decades removed from a meaningful relationship with the business of rural livelihoods, carrying the scars of the struggle for survival under apartheid. Layered onto these traumatic has been the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Professor Siona O’Connell has been working in Elandskloof since 2017 as a result of her research on land restitution, poverty, and inequality in South Africa.