Reasons of Gender. Gender, Household Composition and Land Restitution Process in Colombia

This article analyses the gender context of the land restitution process in Colombia using our own survey data of beneficiaries in Montes de María region on the Atlantic Coast. We find that the fulfilment of legal gender provisions takes place in cultural frames and social structures that could undermine the program's gender distributive potential. As studies on land policies and their gender impacts show, context matters greatly. Our findings confirm main insights of earlier literature with respect to occupation, origin of property and household composition as sources of gender differentiation in Latin America, but advance the agenda in two directions: by showing more nuanced differences between genders, and by highlighting the relevance of household composition in respondents’ decision-making. In particular, it is more likely that women live in one-parent households than men. Furthermore, female respondents expect other family members to work their land, while male respondents intend to work the land themselves. Such differences might have distributional effects so far not sufficiently understood and investigated.