Financialization, resistance, and the question of women’s land rights

ABSTRACT

The financialization of food and agricultural land has been a critical driver of the “land-grabbing” phenomenon in the post 2007–2008 period: the potential for land to be both a productive and financial asset has driven interest in long-term land rentals and sales. Scholars and activists have highlighted the negative effects of these trends for rural populations. International institutions have promoted the recognition of land rights as a means to secure land from seizure, ensure equal participation in land acquisitions, and enable low-income populations, including women, to access credit. At the same time, activists are promoting collective land rights, customary modes of land tenure and the rights of Indigenous peoples. For activists, land reform models that promote the collective rights of peoples to govern land are critical to resisting individualized land ownership models that encourage the alienation of land. This article reviews these rights-based frameworks using a critical feminist perspective and argues that both the institutionalist and activist approaches require more nuanced understandings of gender and difference in order to effect gender-equitable change. This article concludes by mapping new feminist research directions that consider land and resources within the context of local–global processes, the global economy, intersectionality and global rights-based discourses.

KEYWORDS:

• Land governance
• gender
• food sovereignty
• collective rights
• international institutions

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Aaron Ettinger, Jennifer Clapp, and Jo Van Every for their support and feedback in the development of this article. The author also thanks the anonymous reviewers for providing comments. Earlier drafts of this paper were presented at the International Studies Association Annual Conference in 2017 and the International Rural Sociology Association Annual Conference in 2016.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr. Andrea M. Collins is Assistant Professor in the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo and a Fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. She is presently researching the discourses used by global governance actors to describe the roles of women and gender relations in food and agriculture. Her previous work has been published in Journal of Peasant Studies, Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations, Journal of Agrarian Change, and Globalizations.