Land Rights

Citation:

Deere, Carmen Diana. 2003. “Women’s Land Rights and Rural Social Movements in the Brazilian Agrarian Reform.” Journal of Agrarian Change 3 (1-2): 257-88.

Author: Carmen Diana Deere

Abstract:

This article examines the evolution of the demand for women's land rights in the Brazilian agrarian reform through the prism of the three main rural social movements: the landless movement, the rural unions and the autonomous rural women's movement. Most of the credit for raising the issue of women's land rights rests with women within the rural unions. That women's formal land rights were attained in the constitutional reform of 1988 was largely a by–product of the effort to end discrimination against women in all its dimensions. The achievement of formal equality in land rights, nonetheless, did not lead to increases in the share of female beneficiaries of the reform, which remained low in the mid–1990s. This was largely because securing women's land rights in practice was not a top priority of any of the rural social movements. Moreover, the main social movement determining the pace of the agrarian reform, the landless movement, considered class and gender issues to be incompatible. By the late 1990s, nonetheless, there was growing awareness that failure to recognize women's land rights was prejudicial to the development and consolidation of the agrarian reform settlements and thus the movement. The growing consensus among all the rural social movements of the importance of securing women's land rights, coupled with effective lobbying, encouraged the State in 2001 to adopt specific mechanisms for the inclusion of women in the agrarian reform.

Keywords: social movements, women's land rights, agrarian reform, Brazil

Topics: Gender, Women, Rights, Land Rights, Women's Rights Regions: Americas, South America Countries: Brazil

Year: 2003

Citation:

Kandiyoti, Deniz. 2003. “The Cry for Land: Agrarian Reform, Gender and Land Rights in Uzbekistan.” Journal of Agrarian Change 3 (1-2): 225-56.

Author: Deniz Kandiyoti

Abstract:

Agrarian reform in Uzbekistan has been informed by contradictory objectives and priorities. Legislation has oscillated between measures to increase private access to land, in line with populist pressures and the structural reform agenda of international agencies, and counter–measures to tighten and restrict such access in response to the Government imperative of retaining control over the production and export earnings of cotton. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in the provinces of Andijan and Khorezm in 2000–1, this article analyses the role of gendered divisions of labour in the maintenance of a commercial cotton sector alongside a smallholder economy that has become the mainstay of rural livelihoods since the post–Soviet collapse of public sector employment and wages. It also discusses the outcomes of different types of farm restructuring and highlights the gender differentiated outcomes of a reform process that forces a growing number of women out of the recorded labour force into casual, unremunerated and informal work.

Keywords: post-Soviet reform, farm reconstruction, Gender

Topics: Economies, Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, Governance, Livelihoods, Rights, Land Rights, Property Rights, Women's Rights Regions: Asia, Central Asia Countries: Uzbekistan

Year: 2003

Citation:

Walker, Cherryl. 2002. Land Reform in Southern and Eastern Africa: Key Issues for Strengthening Women's Access to and Rights in Land. Harare, Zimbabwe: Sub-regional office for Southern and Eastern Africa, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Author: Cherryl Walker

Keywords: women's land access, socio-economics, culture, HIV/AIDS

Annotation:

This report is the result of a literature review study conducted to explore the area of women's access to land in East and South Africa and to suggest areas for further research. It provides a historical and current overview of land policies, and situates the question of women's access to land within this broader context, considering also its cultural context, its socio-economic implications and its relationship to HIV/ AIDS. The report then discusses the various approaches taken for land reform in these areas, and the implications for women in policies that strengthen customary/communal systems and those that seek to implement a more formal/individualised system. The report presents four case studies from Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe and ends with a list of recommendations for future research and policies in the region.

Topics: Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Health, HIV/AIDS, Rights, Land Rights, Property Rights, Women's Rights Regions: Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa Countries: Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, Zimbabwe

Year: 2002

Citation:

Rose, Laurel L. 2002. “Women’s Strategies for Customary Land Access in Swaziland and Malawi: A Comparative Study.” Africa Today 49 (2): 123-49.

Author: Laurel L. Rose

Abstract:

In most African countries, the land-access and use rights of rural populations have been undergoing considerable changes in recent years, primarily due to informal developments in customary land law at the village level and formal legislative changes in land law at the national level. This paper compares the informal developments, as concerns women's land access, that are occurring in one village of the patrilineal Swazi of Swaziland with those occurring in one village of the matrilineal Chewa of Malawi. In particular, it focuses on two case studies in which a Swazi woman and a Chewa woman resorted to strategies of manipulation, challenge, or change in order to acquire land. It argues that Swazi and Chewa women are similarly confronting evolving systems of customary land access, although individual women in each society are creatively responding to the rules of land access, according to personal and contextual factors.

Keywords: customary

Topics: Gender, Women, Rights, Land Rights Regions: Africa, Southern Africa Countries: Malawi, Swaziland

Year: 2002

Citation:

Mollett, Sharlene. 2010. "Está listo (Are you ready)? Gender, Race and Land Registration in the Río Plántano Biosphere Reserve.” Gender, Place and Culture 17 (3): 357-375.

Author: Sharlene Mollett

Abstract:

Geographers and political ecologists are paying increased attention to the ways in which conservation policies disrupt indigenous customary tenure arrangements. However, much less attention is given to the particular ways protected area management shapes natural resource access for indigenous women. With this in mind, this article examines how a recently proposed state land project in Honduras, Catastro y Regularización, requires that Miskito residents individuate collective family lands in the interests of 'sustainable development' and 'biodiversity protection'. In the debates that followed the project's announcement, Miskito women feared that such measures would erase their customary access to family lands. As the state's project seeks to re-order Reserve land, intra-Miskito struggles intensified among villagers. Such struggles are not only gendered but are shaped by longstanding processes of racialization in Honduras and the Mosquitia region. Drawing upon ethnographic research, I argue that Miskito women's subjectivity and rights to customary family holdings are informed by their ability to make 'patriarchal bargains' with Miskito men inside the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve. Such findings suggest that scholars and policy makers continue to reflect on the ways global conservation and sustainable development practices may undermine indigenous customary tenure securities, whether intentionally or not.

Keywords: indigenous peoples, gender, land registration, protected areas, racialization

Topics: Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Indigenous, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Land Tenure, Race, Rights, Land Rights, Women's Rights Regions: Americas, Central America Countries: Honduras

Year: 2010

Citation:

Flintan, Fiona. 2010. “Sitting at the Table: Securing Benefits for Pastoral Women from Land Tenure Reform in Ethiopia.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 4 (1): 153- 78.

Author: Fiona Flintan

Abstract:

The pastoral areas of Ethiopia are witnessing radical change in terms of both increasingly restricted mobility and access to vital resources. A cause and consequence of such constraints has been a move toward sedentarised forms of livestock and agricultural production. This is occurring in a political and socio-economic vacuum, in which the customary institutions responsible for resource allocation and access to land are becoming weaker, and where the Ethiopian government has yet to develop a clear policy or strategy for resource distribution and tenure security in pastoral areas. To date, pastoral women's property rights have been afforded a certain degree of protection by customary institutions; however, the impact on such protection is likely to be negative as these institutions weaken. Appropriate and effective government protection for women's property rights do not yet exist. Land tenure reform in pastoral areas appears imminent, partly due to increasing conflicts over access to resources, and to the existence of such reforms in other parts of the country. This paper discusses the changing nature of pastoral land rights in Ethiopia through a detailed case study of the Boran people in Oromia Regional State. It sets the case within wider national land reform processes and makes recommendations regarding how civil society and other actors can best engage with land policy and law formulation and implementation processes to secure women's land rights. (Flintan 2010)

Keywords: pastoralism, Borana people, women's rights, sedentarisation, land

Topics: Civil Society, Gender, Women, Land Tenure, Political Economies, Rights, Land Rights, Property Rights, Women's Rights Regions: Africa, East Africa Countries: Ethiopia

Year: 2010

Citation:

Varley, Ann. 2010. “Modest Expectations: Gender and Property Rights in Urban Mexico.” Law and Society Review 44 (1): 67-100.

Author: Ann Varley

Abstract:

This article examines gender and property in Guadalajara, Mexico, in the light of debates that oppose formal title to the social embeddedness of rights in customary law and assert that titling is bad for women. The article focuses on urban homes, private property, and civil law but finds that qualities regarded as characterizing customary property relations also shape popular understandings of property in urban Mexico. Discussion groups and social surveys in four low-income neighborhoods addressed two aspects of family law and property: whose name should appear on titles, and who should inherit the home. The results show that women, as wives, sisters, and daughters, have a secondary relationship to property. They also suggest that the opposition of individual title to socially embedded rights is a false dichotomy and that generalizing arguments about formalization and especially the negative gender implications of titling risks replicating the universalizing tendencies of Western property models.

Keywords: titling, Gender, customary law, gender relations, Property Rights

Annotation:

• Most research on gender and land rights has a geographical focus on rural Africa.  There is less information on gender and land rights in Latin America, and very little work on gender and land rights in urban areas. It also approaches the topic from a different focus—property relations within the family, rather than community—to investigate the gendered aspects of property rights. Therefore, this resource is critical to a thorough understanding of the field and adds new insight into the scope and complexity of gender and land rights issues.  It is argued that relationships between individuals within families and households needs to be the focus; consider how some members may be disadvantaged in comparison to others and the complexity of property relations within the home.  
• The author reviews family law, property and inheritance rights in Mexico: the nineteenth century individualization reforms deprived women of protection, 1917 Law of Family Relations gave women right to manage property and made separation of property mandatory; 1928- ability to choose community or separate property was reintroduced; 2000 community property and joint administration default.
• When people die intestate, the widower is at a disadvantage compared to counterparts elsewhere in Latin America: They are only entitled to the same amount as each child.
• In rural areas, this bias arises out of idea that agriculture is men’s work (an interesting contrast to the African view that agriculture is primarily women’s work, therefore, African women’s ‘secondary’ rights to land cannot be because of agriculture because they are often the primary agriculturalists).
• When examining inheritance rights, the author noted that similar findings from rural Mexico could be seen in urban Mexico. The author also discusses property rights as a way of securing care in old age and “how best to use the home as a bargaining counter to ensure care in old age.” (86)
• This is not something that is frequently discussed in the literature on gender and land rights, but has significant weight in terms of who inherits property. She also importantly notes the differences in opinion between younger and older women about inheritance preferences, noting that older women tend to think about who will care for them: “older women’s responses may reflect a sense of daughters’ vulnerability that is not shared by younger women.” (88)
• Younger women are more likely to subscribe the discourse of equality—and perhaps equality of opportunity—between their children, regardless of sex. Women’s inheritance preferences are often lumped together and viewed as consistent, despite frequently varying opinions about who should inherit land. Asserts that “formalizing home ownership rarely creates truly individual property” because of the social embeddedness of property rights. “Formalization produces a freeze-frame image of property holdings at a particular time but cannot prevent life, death, and property relations moving on. It does not, therefore, offer the definitive resolution of tenure that some assume.” (92)
• What are the potential costs of focussing exclusively on the local when trying to secure women’s property rights? What is the relationship between age and inheritance preferences? What are the similarities in gender and land rights problems across urban and rural settings?
• Key question : Why might formalization in Mexico be favourable to women if it is unfavourable in customary tenure systems in sub-Saharan Africa?
• Legality is not enough to guarantee wives’ security of tenure;  joint titling should be instituted.

Quotes:

“The individual continues to be implicitly opposed to the community in recommendations that rights be registered ‘in the names of groups rather than individuals’ and that this undermines the ability to predict the outcome of formalization." (70)

“How, if women’s property rights are secondary rights both in customary systems and in popular understandings of family property in Mexico, can formalization strengthen those rights in Mexico while it may extinguish them in sub-Saharan Africa?" (70)

“Women in low-income neighbourhoods of urban Mexico are less likely than men to be recognized as freely acting subjects in relation to property: Their ability to ‘own’ a home is to a significant extent conditioned on their status as wives and mothers.” (70)

“Widows inherit primarily as a bridge in the transmission of land between generations or caretakers of the family patrimony… Their rights to land are therefore lesser, insecure, temporary.” (85-86)

“This explanation clearly cannot apply to the urban home, yet the conclusions about women’s secondary relationship to property still resonate with people’s views about rights to the home in Guadalajara.” (86)

“[The] father-son relationship seemed to dominate the men’s thinking about property, while women focused on the marital relationship. Men talked about protecting their wives and children; women, about being protected. Women’s relationship with property is, then, a more indirect, passive one, contrasting with the agency assumed by men.” (80)

“Many women do not assert their rights to property for fear of being seen as less than fully committed to a relationship." (91)

“The legal context in Mexico means that formalization does not normally entail the collapse of overlapping rights in property into full ownership rights for a male head of household. The community property regime under which most couples marry means that the property is generally jointly owned.” (93)

Topics: Gender, Women, Girls, Gendered Power Relations, Land Tenure, Governance, Rights, Land Rights, Property Rights, Women's Rights Regions: Americas, North America Countries: Mexico

Year: 2010

Citation:

Kaarhus, Randi. 2010. “Women’s Land Rights and Land Tenure Reforms in Malawi: What Difference Does Matriliny Make?” Forum for Development Studies 37 (2): 171-92.

Author: Randi Kaarhus

Abstract:

Present-day Malawi is, like a number of other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, involved in land-tenure reform processes aimed at the formalisation of 'customary' land rights through the registering of individual (family) titles. These reform processes also affect women's land rights in areas where land tenure has traditionally been based on matrilineal rules and practices, which is the case in southern and central Malawi. While formalisation of customary land rights as a 'bridge' to development for poor subsistence farmers has been a contested issue in multidisciplinary debates for several years, the question of women's land rights under matrilineal tenure arrangements has so far not been a topic of much debate. This article gives an account of historical processes in Malawi from the late nineteenth century onwards, seeking to describe shifting relations with regard to women's 'transferable interest' in land. It is argued that consecutive constructions of matriliny - first as 'backward', then as a 'puzzle' and a hindrance for (men's) investments in agriculture - constitute a necessary backdrop for an analysis of women's matrilineal rights in land today. Different understandings of matriliny have implications for women's position under current tenure reform initiatives. A re-examination of an earlier land-tenure reform, the World Bank sponsored Lilongwe Land Development Programme (LLDP) implemented in the period 1960s-1980s, provides an empirical example suggesting that new reforms - in spite of non-discriminatory policy objectives - may contribute to the marginalisation of women's rights to increasingly scarce and contested land resources.

Keywords: land rights, formalization, tenure reform, women's rights, gender relations, matriliny, Malawi

Topics: Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Land Tenure, Rights, Land Rights, Women's Rights Regions: Africa, Southern Africa Countries: Malawi

Year: 2010

Citation:

Peters, Pauline E. 2010. “Our Daughters Inherit our Land, but our Sons Use Their Wives’ Fields: Matrilineal-Matrilocal Land Tenure and the New Land Policy in Malawi.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 4 (1): 179-199.

Author: Pauline E. Peters

Abstract:

Renewed efforts in recent years to reform land tenure policy in Sub-Saharan African countries have - in some cases - included provisions aimed at improving women's land rights. The premise of such provisions is that women's land rights under customary tenure are fragile, threatened, and/or in the process of being undermined. The matrilineal-matrilocal areas in Southern Malawi described here present a counter case. Only daughters are the heirs of their matrilineage's land, while sons use their wives' land or, in special circumstances, have temporary use of fields belonging to their female matrikin. This pattern has prevailed in the face of a long and continuing history of prejudice against matriliny. Now, a new land policy, not yet passed into law, includes an explicit aim to protect and improve land rights for women. Yet the means selected by the policy - land inheritance by both sons and daughters and extension of greater authority to traditional leaders in the administration of land - will be likely, if implemented, to have opposite effects in matrilineal-matrilocal areas.

Keywords: matrilineal-matrilocal, land tenure, settlement schemes, gender equity, land policy

Annotation:

• This article is significant in that it confronts the notion that women’s land rights are always “secondary” and “fragile” through examining a matrilineal-matrilocal area where women have the dominant position in land inheritance, instead of the well documented cases of patrilineal-patrilocal areas, where men tend to be in control of land allocation. It highlights the need to consider how land policies intended to strengthen the tenure security of women can, in certain locations, serve to decrease tenure security in areas where women already have a dominant position in land administration. However in arguing that the policy will have a negative impact on women’s control over land rights in matrilineal areas, Peters neglects the positive effects that the new land law will have in improving the tenure security of men in matrilineal areas, increasing gender equity in land rights.
• Peters defines matrilineal and matrilocal principles: “that is, inheritance and succession run through the female line so that children are members of their mother's lineage, the heir to a male authority holder is his sister's son, and, on marriage, husbands move to their wives' village.” (182)
• Impact of policy on matrilineal areas: The policy provides for all children, irrespective of sex, to inherit land from their parents. Paradoxically, if actually implemented, this would greatly reduce women's existing rights in matrilineal-matrilocal areas by including sons as equal heirs, even though it may provide more rights for some women in patrilineal-patrilocal areas.
• Responding to claims that policy would enhance gender equity in land acquisition in both patrilineal and matrilineal social systems, the author says it "appears laudable. However, not only would such changes be a 'departure from existing norms and practices' and hence likely to stimulate 'esistance', but, if put into practice, they would fundamentally reshape kinship and residence patterns and the multiple social relations involved therein.” (191)

Quotes:

“In the many domains of life governed by kinship in this matrilineal-matrilocal area, women exercise considerable authority alongside their brothers. Thus, the brother who is selected as the mwini mbumba is consulted by his sisters in times of important decisions, such as the treatment of an illness, marriage disputes, funeral arrangements, and so on. But he works closely with his sisters in deciding these matters even though he announces the final decision. Beyond these kinship and village domains, however, male authority is the norm in Malawi, and women are largely marginalized.” (184)

“The loss to women which has been documented in other countries undergoing registration and titling of land, would be doubly problematic in Malawi because, in the name of improving women's secure access to land, as currently formulated it will dispossess women in matrilineal-matrilocal areas who currently have highly secure, indeed privileged, rights in comparison with men's.” (194)

Topics: Gender, Women, Men, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Gender Equality/Inequality, Gender Equity, Land Tenure, Rights, Land Rights, Property Rights, Women's Rights Regions: Africa, Southern Africa Countries: Malawi

Year: 2010

Citation:

Brown, Jennifer, and Justine Uvuza. 2006. Women’s Land Rights in Rwanda: How can they be protected and strengthened as the Land Law is implemented? Seattle: Rural Development Institute.

Authors: Jennifer Brown, Justine Uvuza

Abstract:

This report discusses the importance of strengthening women’s rights to land in Rwanda, a country where civil war, genocide and HIV/AIDS have resulted in female-headed households constituting 30 percent of all households in the country. As in much of the developing world, women in Rwanda are heavily involved in and dependent on agriculture. However, despite women’s dependence on land, their access to land generally hinges on their relationships with their birth or marital families and they rarely hold land in their own right. Women in Rwanda still face customary restrictions on land acquisition. The report provides research findings of women’s current land rights, including the rights of women widowed from HIV/AIDS and the Rwandan genocide. The report also discusses Rwanda’s new body of land legislation, RDI’s efforts to develop complementary land legislation to ensure that women’s land rights are taken into careful account, and suggested next steps. (Abstract from Zunia)

Topics: Gender, Women, Rights, Land Rights Regions: Africa, Central Africa, East Africa Countries: Rwanda

Year: 2006