Gender and land dispossession: a comparative analysis

Abstract

This paper seeks to advance our understanding of the gendered implications of land dispossession. It does so through a comparative analysis of five cases of rural land dispossession driven by different economic purposes in diverse agrarian contexts: the English enclosures; colonial and post-colonial rice irrigation projects in The Gambia; large dams in India; oil palm cultivation in Indonesia; and special economic zones in India. The paper first identifies some of the very common gendered effects of dispossession. In each case, it shows that land dispossession reproduced women’s lack of independent land rights or reversed them where they existed, intensified household reproductive work and occurred without meaningful consultation with – much less decision-making by – rural women. The paper secondly demonstrates ways in which the gendered consequences of land dispossession vary across forms of dispossession and agrarian milieux. The most important dimension of this variation is the effect of land loss on the gender division of labour, which is often deleterious but varies qualitatively across the cases examined. The paper also illustrates important variation within dispossessed populations as gender intersects with class, caste and other inequalities. The paper concludes that land dispossession consistently contributes to gender inequality, albeit in socially and historically specific ways. So while defensive struggles against land dispossession will not in themselves transform patriarchal social relations, they may be a pre-condition for more offensive struggles for gender equality.

Keywords:

• land grabs
• gender
• dispossession
• displacement
• enclosure

Notes

1 This paper is a revised and condensed version of a chapter (Levien 2016) that appeared in Gender Equality and Sustainable Development Pathways, edited by Melissa Leach, and that is forthcoming as a UN Women Discussion Paper. For their insight and help in preparing this paper, I would like to thank Sara Berry, Melissa Leach, Shahra Razavi, Seemin Qayum, Ben White, the UN Women staff and participants in their 2014 World Survey on the Role of Women in Development workshop. I would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for JPS whose suggestions substantially improved the paper.

2 In what follows, I use ‘land grab’ as a lay synonym for ‘land dispossession’, and restrict both to instances in which states make people relinquish their land involuntarily (whether or not they receive compensation). This includes instances in which people are dispossessed of land they own or use irrespective of whether the land is under formal or informal tenure (including customary land and commons) and whether or not they received compensation.

3 These and other useful contributions can be found in the special issue of Feminist Economics edited by Doss et al. (2014).

4 Explicitly comparative work on this subject is still limited. Sargeson and Song (2010) demonstrate intriguing variation in the gendered consequences of dispossession for urbanization across regions within China, largely based on variation in women’s village membership – and thus land – rights. Verma (2014) identifies continuities and discontinuities between colonial and contemporary large-scale agricultural projects in Africa, while Tsikata and Yaro (2014) find some differences – within generally bad outcomes – between farmland acquisitions in north and south Ghana. Daley (2011) and Daley and Pallas (2014) survey studies of land dispossession for agricultural investments, aquaculture, urbanization and special economic zones (SEZs) in Africa and Asia. While the latter comes closest to what this paper attempts to do, the studies Daley and Pallas draw upon were not explicitly focused on the gendered implications of land dispossession and thus lack the ethnographic depth that would allow for more fine-grained comparison (Daley and Pallas 2014, 184). Substantively, their findings also suggest mostly negative outcomes, though with a major caveat that I return to shortly. As I will make clear in the conclusion, I believe their focus on making recommendations for reforming land deals is misplaced.

5 Curiously, Daley and Pallas (2014, 191, 195) treat women’s participation in a movement against land dispossession for an SEZ in South India as a positive case of ‘women’s participation in decision-making’ that ‘can actually trigger women’s empowerment’. This is in spite of the fact that this anti-SEZ movement lost, that the mostly Dalit village received very low compensation and that women were worse off after dispossession. I believe it is a mistake to equate women’s resistance to dispossession with ‘participation in decision-making’, much less empowerment that can be seen as a positive impact of these projects.

6 For China and India alone, the estimates are 10 million and 16–28 million respectively (WCD 2000). These figures only include those displaced by reservoirs, and not the millions more displaced by downstream effects, canals and related infrastructure.

7 Braun’s (2011) research shows the ways in which dam construction sites are themselves characterized by discriminatory employment that marginalizes women in the informal economy.

8 For a similar finding in a different context, see Tsikata’s (2006) exhaustive study of Ghana’s Volta River Project.

9 For a particularly brutal (but not isolated) case of how World Bank-funded dams intersected with reactionary dictatorships supported by the United States government during the Cold War, see Johnston’s (2005) study of Guatemala’s Chixoy Dam.

10 The state-wide average for Rajasthan was 906 women to 1000 men, itself below the national average of 927 to 1000 (Census of India 2001; World Bank 2006, 11).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Levien

Michael Levien is an assistant professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University. His book, Dispossession Without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.