Development

Land Tenure, Gender, and Productivity in Ethiopia and Tanzania

Citation:

Melesse, Tigist M., and Yesuf M. Awel. 2020. “Land Tenure, Gender, and Productivity in Ethiopia and Tanzania.” In Women and Sustainable Human Development: Empowering Women in Africa, edited by Maty Konte and Nyasha Tirivayi, 89-108. Maastricht, The Netherlands: Palgrave Macmillan.

Authors: Tigist M. Melesse, Yesuf M. Awel

Abstract:

Agricultural land use and tenure systems in many African countries are characterized by subsistence production and a communal land tenure system. Reforming the tenure system in a way that ensures tenure security could promote sustainable agriculture in the region. In addition, the right of women to own land is essential for rural development. This chapter, therefore, analyses the gender differential effects of land tenure security on productivity in East Africa using Living Standard Measurement Study data from Ethiopia and Tanzania. The chapter uses plot- and household-level data to investigate the effect of land title and other determinants of crop productivity. The main results show that tenure security positively and significantly affects households’ productivity in general and is marginally significant for female-headed households in particular. Potential indicators that positively correlate with crop productivity are total land and plot sizes, inorganic fertilizer use, input credit access, herbicide use, soil, and plot type. Policy implications are based on the results.

Topics: Agriculture, Development, Gender, Gender Analysis, Women, Households, Land Tenure, Livelihoods Regions: Africa, East Africa Countries: Ethiopia, Tanzania

Year: 2020

African Feminism, Land Tenure and Soil Rights in Africa: A Case of Uganda

Citation:

Busingye, Godard. 2020. “African Feminism, Land Tenure and Soil Rights in Africa: A Case of Uganda.” In Legal Instruments for Sustainable Soil Management in Africa, edited by Hadijah Yahyah, Harald Ginzky, Emmanuel Kasimbazi, Robert Kibugi, and Oliver C. Ruppel, 133–55. International Yearbook of Soil Law and Policy. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Author: Busingye, Godard

Abstract:

This chapter discusses the relationship between African feminism, land tenure and soil rights in Africa. It uses the lenses of African feminism, particularly the motherism brand, to provide a medium through which Africans can assert their rights to land and soil. It bases on a case of Uganda to critique the ideology of patriarchy which denies Africans automatic rights to land and soil or jus soli, through policy and the law. Automatic rights to land and soil would ensure that everyone in Africa is bonded to the land and soil as a mother is bonded to her child. Land and soil rights, which mean the same thing to an African, are contemporaneously acquired and are linked to citizenship rights, largely based on the principle of jus sanguinius. A general conclusion drawn is that in order to rectify the situation discussed African governments should use the lenses of African feminism to reconstruct policies and re-enact laws related to land ownership, soil and sustainable development. It recommends that African governments should review their land policies and laws, including constitutions, in order to grant land and soil rights to all Africans based on the principle of jus soli, while that of jus sanguinius should only be adopted in circumstances where it does not disadvantage any person. Future researchers should build on the analysis made herein and step up their advocacy drives to persuade African governments to undertake the necessary reforms in their land regulatory policies and laws. (Abstract from Springer Link)

Topics: Citizenship, Development, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Governance, Land Tenure, Rights, Land Rights Regions: Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa Countries: Uganda

Year: 2020

Neo-Extractivism, the Bolivian State, and Indigenous Peasant Women’s Struggles for Water in the Altiplano

Citation:

Rodriguez Fernandez, Gisela V. 2020. “Neo-Extractivism, the Bolivian State, and Indigenous Peasant Women’s Struggles for Water in the Altiplano.” Human Geography 13 (1): 27–39. 

Author: Gisela V. Rodriguez Fernandez

Abstract:

SPANISH ABSTRACT: 
Al perseguir el progreso y el crecimiento económico, el estado boliviano liderado por el presidente Evo Morales reprodujo la división colonial del trabajo a través de un modelo de desarrollo conocido como neo-extractivismo. Las tensiones arraigadas entre las comunidades indígenas y el estado surgieron debido al fuerte vínculo económico de este último con el sector extractivista. Si bien la economía política del neo-extractivismose ha estudiado considerablemente, la forma en que tales tensiones afectan las relaciones sociopolíticas en las intersecciones de clase, raza y género no se ha explorado y ni teorizado mucho. Para abordar esta brecha de investigación, este estudio cualitativo planteó las siguientes preguntas de investigación: ¿Cómo crea el neo-extractivismo formas inequitativas de género de acumulación por desposesión? ¿Y qué formas de resistencia surgen para desafiar el impacto del neo-extractivismo entre las comunidades indígenas? Al analizar los procesos de reproducción social en Oruro, Bolivia, este estudio muestra que el neo-extractivismo conduce al despojo de tierras indígenas y formas de vida indígenas principalmente a través de la contaminación del agua. Debido a que las mujeres campesinas indígenas son productoras de subsistencia y reproductoras sociales cuyas actividades se centran en el agua, el despojo del agua tiene un efecto más grave y de género en ellas. Sin embargo, las mujeres indígenas y sus comunidades no están ociosas. Han surgido resistencias contra el neo-extractivismo. Paralelamente, las responsabilidades cotidianas de la reproducción social en el contexto de la agricultura de subsistencia, que están integradas en los epistemas andinos de reciprocidad, han permitido a las mujeres campesinas indígenas construir redes de solidaridad que mantienen vivo el tejido social dentro y entre las comunidades. Estas redes de solidaridad proporcionan importantes recursos sociopolíticos que son sitios de resistencias cotidianas que representan una amenaza continua y una alternativa a los mandatos capitalistas, coloniales y patriarcales.
 
ENGLISH ABSTRACT:
In pursuing progress and economic growth, the Bolivian state led by President Evo Morales replicated the colonial division of labor through a development model known as neo-extractivism. Rooted tensions between indigenous communities and the state emerged due to the latter’s zealous economic bond with the extractivist sector. While the political economy of neo-extractivism has been considerably studied, how such tensions affect socio-political relations at the intersections of class, race, and gender remains underexplored and undertheorized. To address this research gap, this qualitative study posed the following research questions: How does neo-extractivism create gendered forms of accumulation by dispossession? And what forms of resistance emerge to challenge the impact of neo-extractivism among indigenous communities? By analyzing processes of social reproduction in Oruro, Bolivia, this study shows that neo-extractivism leads to the dispossession of indigenous lands and indigenous ways of life mainly through the contamination of water. Because indigenous peasant women are subsistence producers and social reproducers whose activities are water centric, the dispossession of water has a direr and gendered effect on them. Indigenous women and their communities, however, are not idle. Resistances against neo-extractivism have emerged. In parallel, the daily responsibilities of social reproduction within the context of subsistence agriculture, which are embedded in Andean epistemes of reciprocity, have allowed indigenous peasant women to build solidarity networks that keep the social fabric within and between communities alive. These solidarity networks provide important socio-political resources that are sites of everyday resistances that represent an ongoing threat and an alternative to capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal mandates.

Keywords: extractivism, Bolivia, indigenous, women, resistance, extractivismo, mujeres indígenas, resistencia

Topics: Development, Extractive Industries, Gender, Women, Indigenous, Infrastructure, Water & Sanitation, Rights, Indigenous Rights, Land Rights Regions: Americas, South America Countries: Bolivia

Year: 2020

In Search of Feminist Foreign Policy: Gender, Development, and Danish State Identity

Citation:

Richey, Lisa Ann. 2001. “In Search of Feminist Foreign Policy: Gender, Development, and Danish State Identity.” Cooperation and Conflict 36 (2): 177-212.

Author: Lisa Ann Richey

Abstract:

This article investigates the extent to which the Danish state's identification with gender issues is transferred into Danish development policy. Is Denmark pursuing a gender and development policy that is radically different from most other Western donor states and, if not, why might we see a less progressive policy in Denmark than we might expect from a domestically `feminist' state? In this article, it is suggested that the very nature of development aid and the policies in place to promote it are gendered. Gender and development aid could provide an arena for international constitution of domestically `feminist' policies. However, it is argued that `development' itself poses important challenges for implementing the goals of Denmark's gender and development policies. Conversely, implementing the critical strategy of agenda-setting within gender and development would reconstitute both `development' and the identity of the Danish state as donor.

Topics: Development, Feminisms, Feminist Foreign Policy, Gender, Gendered Discourses Regions: Europe, Nordic states, Northern Europe Countries: Denmark

Year: 2001

Conservation as Enclosure: An Ecofeminist Perspective on Sustainable Development and Biopiracy in Costa Rica

Citation:

Isla, Ana. 2005. “Conservation as Enclosure: An Ecofeminist Perspective on Sustainable Development and Biopiracy in Costa Rica.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 16 (3): 49–61.

Author: Ana Isla

Annotation:

Summary:
"This paper argues that the rhetoric of sustainable development reinforces the power and reach of global capitalism. Using the language of conservation, industry, large environmental NGOs, and local government elites are sacrificing the survival of forest peoples to capital accumulation. Enclosures of common lands for the purpose of bioprospecting liquidate the customary claims of forest ownership. As a result, conservation as enclosure suppresses the human rights of local communities and the rights of nature. In this process, campesinos and indigenous people are impoverished as their local environments move from abundance to scarcity in a commodified world, and they themselves become displaced, marginalized, even criminalized, and unwaged in a waged global world. Women lose their autonomy in gender and development programs that claim to promote equality by including them in the international market. They are pushed into capitalized biotech micro-enterprises, become indebted, overextend their work time, and substitute family food production for the cultivation of medicinal plants—all for less than a minimum wage. By these predatory programs, a vulnerable local nature and vulnerable local women are tied into the world economy, not for conservation or emancipation, but to be exploited for capital accumulation" (Isla 2005, 13-4).

Topics: Development, Environment, Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, Indigenous, Rights, Human Rights, Indigenous Rights Regions: Americas, Central America Countries: Costa Rica

Year: 2005

Climate Change and Feminist Environmentalism in the Niger Delta, Nigeria

Citation:

Amadi, Luke A., Mina M. Ogbanga, and James E. Agena. 2015. “Climate Change and Feminist Environmentalism in the Niger Delta, Nigeria.” African Journal of Political Science and International Relations 9 (9): 361–71.

Authors: Luke A. Amadi, Mina M. Ogbanga, James E. Agena

Abstract:

Feminist environmentalist debate explores possible linkages between women and environmental issues such as inequality. One of the most pressing global problem at the centre of this debate is climate change vulnerability. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) creates global policy awareness on the realities of climate change vulnerability, women in the poor coastal regions of the periphery societies such as the Niger Delta, Nigeria, prone to environmental degradation seem to be missing out. This subject matter has been of immense policy concern. The increase in recent decades of environmental disasters, deleterious effects of oil resource exploitation by the Multinational Corporations (MNCs), pollution, gas flaring, acid rain, sea level rise, ozone layer depletion, global warming and related pressures, provide the need to explore feminist environmental challenges. As all such problems manifest with divergent climate related implications, the most fundamental challenge they pose to women seem less talked about. Niger Delta women who are largely bread winners in most rural households are at risk as their subsistence relies heavily on the natural environment such as farming, fishing, petty trading, gathering of periwinkles, oysters, crayfish etc. To explore this dynamic, the study deployed a desk review of relevant secondary data to examine possible linkages between feminist environmentalism and climate change mitigation. Findings suggest that climate change, mitigation has been minimal. The paper made some policy recommendations.

Keywords: environmental security, climate change, women, development, Niger Delta

Topics: Development, Environment, Climate Change, Environmental Disasters, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, Livelihoods, Multi-National Corporations Regions: Africa, West Africa Countries: Nigeria

Year: 2015

Diasporic Subjects: Gender and Mobility in South Sulawesi

Citation:

Silvey, Rachel M. 2000. “Diasporic Subjects: Gender and Mobility in South Sulawesi.” Women’s Studies International Forum 23 (4): 501–15.

Author: Rachel M. Silvey

Abstract:

The economic downturn in Indonesia (1997‐99) has changed the context of gendered spatial mobility in South Sulawesi. For low-income migrants in the region, the monetary crisis has not only reorganized the labor market, but it has also brought about an intensification of the stigma placed on young women's independent residence in an export processing zone. Household surveys and in-depth interviews with migrants and members of their origin and destination site neighborhoods, both before and during the economic retrenchment, illustrate that ideas about women's sexual morality are a key part of the context within which migration decisions are gendered. The article situates survey and interview findings within an overview of Indonesia's recent development history, economic crisis, and official state gender ideology. The article argues that migrants and their communities have identified the ‘prostitute’ as a female-gendered metaphor for the crisis, and finds that post-1997 narratives of women's mobility increasingly revolve around normative judgements regarding young women's independent mobility and sexual behavior.

Topics: Development, Displacement & Migration, Migration, Economies, Gender, Gendered Discourses, Women Regions: Asia, Southeast Asia Countries: Indonesia

Year: 2000

Listening to the Landscapes of Mama Tingo: From the ‘Woman Question’ in Sustainable Development to Feminist Political Ecology in Zambrana-Chacuey, Dominican Republic

Citation:

Rocheleau, Dianne. 2007. “Listening to the Landscapes of Mama Tingo: From the ‘Woman Question’ in Sustainable Development to Feminist Political Ecology in Zambrana-Chacuey, Dominican Republic.” In A Companion to Feminist Geography, edited by Lise Nelson and Joni Seager, 419–33. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.

Author: Dianne Rocheleau

Abstract:

Summary:
“In the rural countryside of the Dominican Republic environmental change has long been tied to livelihoods and landscapes and enmeshed in struggles for social justice and rights to land. In the early 1990s I went with a team of three other researchers to the rolling hills of the Zambrana–Chacuey region in the center of the country to learn about and document the recent community forestry experience of women and men who had been engaged in peasant land struggles against large commercial landowners for decades. Our goal was to see how gender and class had affected their sustainable development and forestry enterprise efforts, and in turn, how these initiatives had changed gendered social relations in the region. We ended up in a dialogue that I call “listening to the landscape,” since every feature in this patchwork of farms, forests, gardens, and homesteads was tied to stories of individual lives, families, communities, and social movements” (Rocheleau, 2007, 419).

Topics: Class, Development, Environment, Feminisms, Feminist Political Ecology, Gender, Gendered Power Relations, Livelihoods, Rights, Land Rights Regions: Americas, Caribbean countries Countries: Dominican Republic

Year: 2007

Introduction: Troubling Gender Expertise in Environment and Development

Citation:

Resurrección, Bernadette P., and Rebecca Elmhirst. 2020. "Introduction: Troubling Gender Expertise in Environment and Development.” In Negotiating Gender Expertise in Environment and Development: Voices from Feminist Political Ecology, 1-24. London: Routledge.

Authors: Bernadette P. Resurrección, Rebecca Elmhirst

Abstract:

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the daily struggles and achievements of ‘gender experts’ in the environment and development world. It explores the possible tensions and ruptures that are involved in bringing the feminist knowledges that underpin gender mainstreaming into the realm of technical and scientific knowledges that inform the work of environment and technical development organisations. The book presents a collection of polyvocal essays written together with ‘gender experts’ working in technical and environmental science-led organisations, whose work is for the most part geographically located in the global South. The ‘doing’ of gender mainstreaming or gender-inclusive work has led to the emergence of the ‘gender expert’, a figure that is central to the professionalisation of ‘gender’ within the realm of environment and development organisations, programmes and interventions.

Topics: Development, Environment, Feminist Political Ecology, Gender, Gender Mainstreaming

Year: 2020

Canada’s Feminist Foreign Policy and the SDGs: Working with Business to Address Gender Inequality

Citation:

Kilgour, Maureen A.. 2020. “Canada’s Feminist Foreign Policy and the SDGs: Working with Business to Address Gender Inequality.” In ​Struggles and Successes in the Pursuit of Sustainable Development,​ edited by Tay Keong Tan, Milenko Gudic, and Patricia M. Flynn. New York: Routledge.

Author: Maureen A. Kilgour

Abstract:

Gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls are critical elements in the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). State governments, businesses and civil society have all been asked to work toward the achievement of the SDGs. Given the complexity of the current global governance regime and the overlapping interests among the various actors, collaboration and innovation are required to move toward the achievement of these goals. The Canadian government (Canada) has historically been a strong advocate for international action on gender inequality. This engagement was formalized in 2017, when the Canadian government committed to a “feminist” foreign policy. The goal of this chapter is to discuss the early successes and challenges in the implementation of a “feminist” approach to the attainment of the SDGs with a focus on Canada’s relationship with business. It examines areas of interaction between Canada’s feminist policy in support of the SDGs and business and identifies both strengths and weaknesses. A review of Canada’s SDG initiatives in support of gender equality provides insights into the ways in which governments intersect with business on sustainability issues and highlights areas of interrogation for responsible management education, especially in the area of gender equality. 

Topics: Development, Feminisms, Feminist Foreign Policy, Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Regions: Americas, North America Countries: Canada

Year: 2020

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