A critical analysis of the different aspects of policymaking – design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation – requires a deconstruction of the idea of planned development. Its theoretical conceptions, its notions of time and space and its normative assumptions all have to be critically examined. This chapter aims to adopt this sort of critical approach towards development, taking as its object of study the Massive Food Production Programme (MFPP) in the Eastern Cape. Rather than approaching this programme as a linear practice, it views it as an embedded practice, shaped by negotiations and networks that cut across formal institutional boundaries. These negotiations and networks operate on multiple levels, and involve multiple values and realities. The outcomes of a programme such as the MFPP, I argue, are shaped by the ways in which human needs and desires are formulated as well as by the unfolding of organisational capabilities, the development of power relations, the growth of skills and knowledge, and the clash of different ways of ordering the world (Long 2001). It is essential, therefore, to look at how actors (individually or in a network) process social experiences and devise ways of coping with life under circumstances that are partly created by interventions such as the MFPP.

I begin the discussion of the programme by describing its design and implementation. I go on to examine the theoretical assumptions that underpin the intervention. I then explore the multiple realities of the rural Eastern Cape province in order to show the different ways in which rural beneficiaries have accommodated the MFPP in their agricultural activities. I focus on three cases which have been selected because they are representative of some of the different labour patterns and land tenure systems that prevail in the Eastern Cape. The cases are the Majali MFPP project in Buffalo City Municipality, representative of communal lands in the former Ciskei homeland; the Ngxakaxha MFPP project in Mbhashe Municipality, typifying communal lands in the former Transkei homeland; and the Ndakana farm project in Amahlati Municipality, which represents private land ownership in an area that was formerly known as a ‘black spot’, a small area in which black people were allowed to own land in the apartheid era.