Abstract
South Africa’s democratic transition in 1994 marked a national commitment to redressing racial exclusion, unequal resource access and concentrated ownership patterns. Despite extensive post-apartheid reforms, the country continues to grapple with inequality, unemployment and poverty, which impede inclusive growth. Agriculture remains a strategically significant sector, central to food security, employment creation and export competitiveness. However, it continues to exhibit a dualistic structure in which a well-resourced commercial subsector co-exists with a marginalised smallholder system characterised by limited access to land, finance, markets, technology and institutional support. These disparities suppress the participation and competitiveness of historically disadvantaged groups, including black smallholder farmers, women, youth and persons with disabilities.
Although policy instruments such as land reform, blended finance initiatives and the Agriculture and Agro-processing Master Plan were designed to correct historical distortions, progress across value chains has remained slow and uneven. Existing literature offers useful insights into productivity, land reform patterns and policy reforms, but pays insufficient attention to organisational readiness, leadership behaviour, institutional coordination and change management processes within state-owned agricultural enterprises. This gap is significant because transformation in complex, regulated systems is shaped not only by policy design, but also by organisational capability, institutional efficiency, stakeholder alignment and internal change dynamics.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the challenges and barriers faced by state-owned enterprises and smallholder farmers in advancing agricultural transformation, identify enabling conditions that support progress, assess policy effectiveness and develop a practical, context-specific change management conceptual framework. The study is theoretically anchored in Kotter’s 8-step model, Lewin’s 3-stage model, the ADKAR model, institutional theory and stakeholder theory. Integrating these perspectives enabled a multidimensional analysis of organisational behaviour, institutional pressures, decision-making processes and stakeholder dynamics shaping transformation outcomes.