Transnational Land Deals and Gender Equality: Utilitarian and Human Rights Approaches

Figures & data

Table 1.  Transnational land acquisition: Gendered dimensions and women's interests

	Gendered	Women's interests:
Category	dimensions	Benefits, rights, and power
Situation prior	Tenure, power and politics, labor roles, environment, food security, vulnerability	Promote women's opportunities and address vulnerabilities
Resource capture	Power relations, consultation, and decision making	Defend or enhance women's rights, status, and participation to hinder a patriarchal capture
Implementation	Information, communication, appraisal, planning, implementation, monitoring and learning	Promote women's knowledge, participation, and control
Direct impact	Access to land, food, energy, water, livelihoods, employment and labor rights, residence, living conditions	Prevent risk and harm. Enhance the opportunities and benefits for women as producers, workers, and care givers, and girl children's access to food and education
Environment	Natural resources, landscape, cultural and aesthetic values	Enhance women's access to and well-being from water, energy, wild species, etc.
Collective action and society	Resistance, power, social differentiation, intrahousehold relations, institutions	Enhance women's and men's action and organization to promote their equal rights through cooperating with or resisting land appropriators
Political economy of agrarian change	Employment, land structure, production, proletarianization, pauperization, migration	Promote long-term changes in resource distribution, power relations, and institutions that advance the interests of women and girls

Sources: Shanmugaratnam 1985; Tsikata 2009; von Braun and Meinzen-Dick 2009; Behrman, Meinzen-Dick, and Quisumbing 2012; Daley 2011; De Schutter 2011; Tsikata and Yaro 2011.

Table 2.  Author's summaries of the orientation of utilitarian and human rights approaches

Aspects	Utilitarian	Human rights
Ethical orientation	Consequentialist	Deontological and consequentialist
Justification for concern with gender	Promote women's participation to maximize the common good	The right to equality with regard to the enjoyment of all human rights
Development goal	Sustainable economic growth	Human rights realization
Means and process of development	Capital, investment, innovation	Government leadership, social action, and institutional development
Impact parameters	Multiple: Economic, environmental, social	Multiple: Realization of human rights

Table 3.  Author's characterization of utilitarian and human rights lenses on transnational land acquisition

Land deal stages	Utilitarian	Human rights
Situation prior	Economic analysis focused on poverty and under-utilization of land	Power, inequality, and the role of land for human rights (women, men, children)
Project appraisal	Economic, social, and environmental costs and benefits	Human rights analysis of plans, processes, and guarantees
Consultation	Prevent conflict with minimal transaction costs	Rights to information; informed consent; inclusion; gender-balanced participation
Negotiation	Maintain control and resolve conflict with minimal transaction costs	Gender-equal and effective decision making
Contracts	Secure interest, clarify obligations	Secure rights, clarify obligations
Compensation	Monetary (losses can be redressed)	Socially appropriate and comprehensive (human rights violations cannot be compensated)
Resettlement	A cost factor	Last resort – compliant with human rights
Implementation	Output oriented	Process and empowerment oriented
Employment	Maximize return, reduce cost	Equal access; labor rights
Production	Promote efficiency	Meet needs and rights
Enforcement	Based on actor interest in maximization	State responsibility for rights realization
Impact	Mainly aggregate economic	Mainly realization of human rights
Monitoring	To identify inefficiencies and benefits	To identify rights violations/realization

Shanmugaratnam, Nadarajah. 1985. “Colonial Agrarian Changes and Underdevelop- ment.” In Capital and Peasant Production: Studies in the Continuity and Discontinuity of Agrarian Structures in Sri Lanka, edited by Charles Abeysekere, 1–19. Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association of Sri Lanka.

 Google Scholar

Tsikata, Dzodzi. 2009. “Gender, Land and Labour Relations and Livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa in the Era of Economic Liberalisation: Towards a Research Agenda.” Feminist Africa 12: 11–30. http://agi.ac.za/sites/agi.ac.za/files/fa12_feature_tsikata.pdf.

 Google Scholar

von Braun, Joachim and Ruth Meinzen-Dick. 2009. “Land Grabbing” by Foreign Investors in Developing Countries: Risks and Opportunities. IFPRI Policy Brief No. 13. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute.

 Google Scholar

Behrman, Julia, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, and Agnes Quisumbing. 2012. “The Gender Implications of Large-Scale Land Deals.” Journal of Peasant Studies 39(1): 49–79. doi: 10.1080/03066150.2011.652621

 Web of Science ®Google Scholar

Daley, Elizabeth. 2011. Gendered Impacts of Commercial Pressures on Land. Rome: Mokoro/International Land Coalition. http://www.landcoalition.org/publications/gendered-impacts-commercial-pressures-land.

 Google Scholar

Tsikata, Dzodzi and Joseph Yaro. 2011. “Land Market Liberalization and Trans-national Commercial Land Deals in Ghana Since the 1990s.” Paper presented at the International Conference on Global Land Grabbing, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, April 6–8.

 Google Scholar