This archival paper takes a hard look at the claim that Communal Property Institutions established as part of South Africa's land reform programme are failing. It argues that there are no meaningful indicators against which assessments of success or failure can be made.

This report was prepared for the Department of Land Affairs (DLA) in South Africa. In 2001 DLA set up the Communal Property Institutions (CPI) Task Team to review land reform legal entities.

Approaches to securing tenure have been dominated by debates about whether titling advances secure land tenure and development in developing countries or whether it is either ineffectual or detrimental to socially more relevant systems.

The paper asserts that in order to be effective it is important to work with and from existing tenure systems and to build upon them, rather than expect that they can be “demolished and replaced by efficient new systems”.

This paper argues that the focus in the community based natural resource management (CBNRM) literature on the devolution and decentralisation of state authority and responsibility over natural resources to communities does not pay sufficient attention to the role of the state in creating and main