Evaluating the socio-economic viability of revitalizing communal irrigation schemes in the Eastern Cape, South Africa: an analytic hierarchy process approach to land-system governance

The persistent underperformance and land abandonment in post-apartheid South Africa’s smallholder irrigation schemes (SIS) reflect a critical failure in land system governance and constrain rural economic development. This paper presents a quantitative evaluation of the proposed revitalization of 10 SIS in the Eastern Cape Province, reframed as a land-use transition intervention. Using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), a multi-criteria decision-making tool, we developed a model to assess and rank the viability of internal schemes. Data were synthesized from the rapid appraisal process (RAP), technical stakeholder consultations, and socio-economic profiling. The AHP hierarchy was structured around three evaluation factors: infrastructure, water delivery service, and management entities. Results show that the reliability and serviceability of water delivery service—the interface between management and infrastructure—exhibits the strongest statistical correlation with crop productivity, while infrastructure and management conditions in isolation show limited direct correlation. Effective land system functioning, therefore, depends less on asset presence than on the efficiency of the flow regimes they enable. The proposed AHP framework provides a robust decision-support tool for allocating scarce public resources and structuring partnerships to transition over 9,400 ha of underutilized communal land into productive, climate-resilient agriculture, strengthening rural livelihoods and regional resilience to global change.