Liberalisation and the debates on women's access to land

Abstract

The reform of land tenure institutions is now back on the national and global policy agendas. While at a certain level of generality, the principle of gender equality in access to resources, including land, has been endorsed by a diverse range of policy actors, there is a number of tensions and ambiguities that are likely to obstruct women's effective access to land and its contribution to decent livelihoods. There are important questions about liberalisation policies vis-à-vis land, given the well documented difficulties that low-income women in particular face in accessing land through markets. Moreover, despite the ‘small’ or ‘family farming’ vision that underpins neoclassical (and neoliberal) policy prescriptions, access to land can only play a complementary role in women's (and men's) livelihoods, and one that needs to be matched by income from employment. But many developing countries today confront formidable barriers to industrialisation and employment generation—historical preconditions for both poverty eradication and gender equality. There are also troubling implications from a gender perspective in the current endorsement of ‘customary’ systems of land tenure and decentralisation of land management. Women's rights advocates fear that this can play into the hands of powerful interest groups hostile to women's rights.

It is now widely recognised that the agrarian reforms implemented in the era of state-led redistributive efforts—the ‘golden age’ of land reform spanning from the 1910s to the 1970s—were largely gender-blind. These reforms were often based on an implicit assumption that assets allocated to households—typically to the male ‘head’—would benefit all members equitably. Not only did such assumptions ignore the well-being of women and their dependents in the event of household dissolution (upon separation, divorce or widowhood), they were also blind to women's differing relationship to property and the fact that household (often male) ownership of land can more deeply exploit women's labour through heavier work loads in the form of generally unpaid family labour,1 and adversely affect their position within the conjugal contract.2

In the 1990s a wide and diverse array of policy actors was able to place the reform of land tenure institutions back on the national and global policy agendas, inciting an intense debate about land reform and its potential developmental significance. At the heart of these ongoing debates are diverging views about effective routes to poverty eradication and the roles of small farm production and employment generation in the construction of the social wage, as well as broader concerns about the productivity of farming and the exigencies of accumulation and growth in developing countries.

Have the interests of diverse groups of women—in particular those from landless households, and those whose households control small and marginal plots of land—found a more secure place in this new wave of reforms than they did in the ‘golden age’? While, at a certain level of generality, the principle of gender equality in access to resources, including land, has been endorsed by a diverse range of policy actors, a number of tensions and ambiguities have emerged. These include key questions about liberalisation policies vis-à-vis land, land markets as a vehicle for women's inclusion, and employment generation as an effective strategy for both poverty eradication and gender equality. There are also troubling implications from a gender perspective in the current endorsement of ‘customary’ systems of land tenure and decentralisation of land management. Women's rights advocates fear that this can play into the hands of powerful interest groups hostile to women's rights. Finally, more attention needs to be paid to the ways in which women's interests are articulated and struggled for. As has been repeatedly argued, women's and men's interests within marriage and the household are both joint and separate—an ambiguity that is well captured by the notion of ‘co-operative conflict’.3 This has important implications for how rural women's mobilisations (or lack thereof) are understood, and the kinds of policy responses that are needed to accommodate their interests.

Recent policy and political shifts

It is no secret that, while the redistributive land reforms—in South Korea and Taiwan, for example, or even more recently the tenancy reforms in West Bengal—were successful in reducing class-based inequalities, they were strongly biased towards men deemed to be the legitimate heads of households. Admittedly the earlier reforms took place at a time when the gender question was still dormant and women's organisations lacked their current visibility and voice—an explanation that is less applicable in the case of West Bengal's Operation Barga, initiated in the late 1970s.4 The historical inattention to gender inequality has been somewhat redressed by recent developments within the political and policy domains, as well as by the ‘discovery’ by neoclassically inclined economists of the intrahousehold arena as a realm worthy of research. We consider these factors in turn.

The turn to democracy and human rights

The post-cold war developments gave women's rights agendas greater force and legitimacy. While mobilisation in opposition to authoritarian rule has not always secured women representation in formal institutional politics, it nevertheless galvanised women's movements. This helped bring women's rights into the process of constitution writing and the reform of civil codes in many countries. The Brazilian and South African ‘transitions’ are often held up as exemplary for legitimising women's rights agendas through constitutional and legislative reforms. In Latin America more broadly one of the main achievements of the rise and consolidation of the women's movement has been the elimination of the provision in most national civil codes which designates the husband as the legal ‘head of household’. This has now been replaced by the concept of the dual-headed household, where both husband and wife jointly represent the household and manage its common property.5

These national-level developments were reinforced by the attention paid to rights-based approaches at the global level. The cluster of UN-sponsored conferences held in the 1990s provided women's rights advocates with a public forum and stimulated debate, both domestic and international, over policy. In these various policy arenas, women's movements and their representatives were active participants. Women lawyers, coming together through regional and sub-regional groupings, have become particularly influential as advocates demanding legal reform.

The rise and influence of the associations and groupings composed of women lawyers seem to confirm Manji's observation that the past two decades have been ‘the age of land law reform in Africa’.6 The context for this has been the broader ‘rule of law’ and ‘good governance’ agendas pioneered and funded by the international financial institutions, most notably the World Bank, in the aftermath of the East Asian financial crisis, as the emphasis shifted away from macroeconomic policy to the ‘institutions’ that undergird development and growth.7

But feminist lawyers in Africa as elsewhere have long been concerned with women's rights within legal systems, advocating constitutional reforms to end sex discrimination and to guarantee women's rights in all spheres, including in family laws and family relations, as well as through stronger support for women's economic security through reforms to property laws, primarily those concerning land.8 The fact that many of these advocates speak the language of ‘rights’ and ‘rule of law’ hardly reflects their buy-in to the neoliberal agenda along the lines suggested by Manji. Indeed, following Gramsci's analysis of the way in which powerful institutions take up progressive agendas as part of their hegemonic project, one could point to the way in which concepts such as ‘rights’ (and ‘governance’), which were initially used by social movements and women's rights advocates to critique mainstream policies, have increasingly been distorted and emptied of their meanings in the hands of powerful policy-making institutions.9

This is not to deny the limitations of the conceptual frameworks within which feminist lawyers operate, which tend to downplay the strength of power inequalities and institutional biases as constraints on women's ability to make effective claims on resources (on which more below). In practice these advocates take different positions on a variety of issues, and some recognise the limitations of law as a vehicle for social change, acknowledging that there may be enormous resistance to equitable practices, and severe limits to law as ‘an instrument of social change’.10 Nevertheless, while the gap between formal and substantive rights is often noted, the assumption is that women's ignorance has prevented them from enforcing their rights—hence their efforts to popularise laws relevant to women's rights and to promote legal literacy.

The other overlapping stream of activism within which attention has been drawn to women's land rights is at the level of social movements, ngos and Land Alliances. Oxfam GB has been heavily involved in supporting ngos and coalitions in Eastern and Southern Africa for the past 10 years.11 While the importance of building coalitions between gender advocates and other ‘progressive’ forces is often emphasised, divisions and tensions often render such alliances problematic and short-lived, as recent analyses of policy contestations in Tanzania have shown.12 While in this case ‘progressive’ forces could be faulted for their blindness to the mechanisms that discriminate against women, the debates in Tanzania also exposed the divisions and blind spots within women's groups (see below).

Other actors have included social movements of significant political weight, most notably, the Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (mst). Initially some of these movements were criticised for replicating the ‘male breadwinner – female dependant’ bias entrenched in state-led land reform initiatives, through their bottom-up land invasions and the setting up of agrarian reform settlements. It took more than a decade of activism by feminists within the movement for women's rights to be strongly articulated by rural social movements in Brazil.13 This is explained by the multiple and often competing venues for participation which opened up to rural women, and the many priorities of these rural social movements. It was not until the exclusion of women began to have ‘real practical consequences for the consolidation of the agrarian reform settlements (the assentamentos) that women's land rights became an issue within the main social movement leading the agrarian reform, the mst … and for the state’.14

The South African Landless People's Movement (lpm) has yet to achieve the power and presence of mst, but early analysis suggests that race has trumped gender: ‘at all levels of the movement there has been very little discussion of gender in relation to the work and struggles of the movement’ even though ‘there is a strand within the movement that takes gender equality seriously and seeks to build this into the work and structures of the movement’.15 What these two examples point to is the pervasiveness of normative assumptions about the ‘proper’ place of women and men across policy institutions—not only in top-down bureaucratic donor organisations and patriarchal states, but also in ‘progressive’ social movements, ngos and community organizations.

Livelihoods in the era of liberalisation

Yet the recent advances in political and legal rights have not been matched by significant progress in livelihoods and social justice. Indeed, throughout the 1980s and 1990s income inequalities have been rising in most countries, while growth rates in much of the developing world (except India and China) have also been sluggish. It is important to place the ‘woman and land’ question that is the topic of this paper in the broader context of capitalist transformations in developing countries, and of two decades of orthodox liberalisation policies that have exacerbated the inequalities and social tensions inherent to such processes, while doing little to generate sustained economic growth and structural transformation.

The economic crisis of the early 1980s was diagnosed by the international financial institutions to stem from heavy state involvement in the economy. The agricultural sector, it was argued, was a prime victim of state-directed economic regimes marked by ‘urban bias’: the heavy drainage of agricultural surplus through forced indirect taxation depressed farming incomes and led to the poor performance of the agricultural sector. The ‘distortions’ introduced by state policy were to be corrected by letting market forces determine product and input prices and the terms of trade between agriculture and the rest of the economy, while tenure insecurity was to be tackled through land titling.16 These standard measures, it was argued, would restore agricultural export growth and improve rural incomes and livelihoods. At the same time cutbacks in public expenditure outlays on agricultural input subsidies, marketing boards, and research and extension services were prescribed and justified on the grounds that state expenditure needed to be significantly lowered and that the benefits were, in any case, either being captured by big farmers or squandered by state officials.

There followed two decades of extensive experimentation with the liberalisation of the agricultural sector, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as liberalisation progressed, sub-Saharan Africa witnessed the steady decline of its agricultural exports as a share of world agricultural trade.17 Meanwhile the problems surrounding food production and security were far from resolved. Deteriorating household food security in Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe in the late 1990s were attributed to the loss of subsidies for fertilisers and seeds and of rural credit, and to the erosion of agricultural marketing services, especially in remote areas.18

For much of Latin America, during the 1980s—the first reform decade—the growth rate veered widely; this crisis-ridden period also saw an overall increase in poverty, from 41% to 48% of all households. During the 1990s agricultural growth averaged only 2.2%. Poverty indices improved, but only at a laggardly pace, so that Latin America entered the new millennium with a higher proportion of poor and indigent rural people than in 1980.19 At the same time the economic reforms tended to reinforce existing divides between regions and producers.

Given the dismal record, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, the proponents of reform have increasingly accepted that agriculture's response to liberalisation has been disappointing.20 It has also been persuasively shown that the notion of ‘urban bias’ has in fact obscured more than it has illuminated the problems in developing country agriculture by reducing the problem to one simple cause outside the sector itself (namely, government policy bias), while ignoring the resource transfers into agriculture.21 In other words, while agricultural prices may have been artificially depressed because of an overvalued exchange rate and export taxes, this was to varying degrees redressed through positive resource transfers into the sector via public investment, subsidised credit and agricultural services.22

Meanwhile, industrial growth, which has historically been the sine qua non of massive poverty reduction by absorbing the labour force that is released from agriculture, has remained anaemic in recent decades in developing countries, with the exception of East Asia.23 Indeed, one of the remarkable features of structural change in contemporary developing countries has been the disproportionate shift of the labour force from agriculture to ‘services’ (rather than to industry), which is ominous, as much of this can be thinly disguised survival strategies indicative of a desperate effort to turn to anything that might be available (which happens to fall into the ‘services’ rubric).24 Deflationary macroeconomic policies, the external liberalisation of developing country economies and the concomitant demonisation of industrial policies are at least partly to blame for the low rates of growth and the lack of structural transformation of these economies.25

Ideational shifts: gender and the household

The intra-household arena has come under increasing scrutiny over the past couple of decades, initially by feminists from diverse disciplinary currents,26 and of late by neoclassically inclined microeconomists and modellers, some of whom are associated with the World Bank and the International Food Policy Research Institute (ifpri).

For nearly three decades the feminist literature has drawn attention to the unequal distribution of resources and power within households along gender and generational lines. Some of the literature has also documented women's greater attachment to the welfare of children (evident in women's spending priorities for example).27 Some of these findings seem to have been taken up selectively by policy institutions: anti-poverty programmes, whether in the form of micro-credit or cash transfers, increasingly target women on the grounds that they will spend the resources under their control in ways that will enhance family and child welfare.

A different strand of thinking, very popular with neoclassically oriented economists, uses microeconomic analytical tools to argue that the structure of male and female incentives in farm households (in sub-Saharan Africa) leads to ‘allocative inefficiencies’ and a muted agricultural supply response.28 These analyses have been abstracted from a set of empirical accounts of agricultural production in sub-Saharan Africa.29 One important resource constraint to which they draw attention is women's inadequate access to land, thereby facilitating the absorption of ‘the gender asset gap’ into key policy documents.30 The conclusion often drawn is that redressing gender imbalance in control of productive resources (land, labour, inputs) will enhance the efficient use of scarce resources, and reduce poverty and gender inequality. While attractive and appealing from an advocacy standpoint, recent critical analysis of this literature by feminists considers the policy conclusions that are drawn to be highly questionable, if not ‘mythical’, as a strategy for poverty reduction in rural sub-Saharan Africa.31

Interestingly there are some parallels between the above-mentioned neoclassical arguments for gender equality and arguments made by some economists for redistributive land reform as a mechanism for reducing poverty and enhancing growth and equity.32 The argument for redistributive land reform, like the argument for gender equity, is based on the understanding that current resource allocation (to ‘large landowners’ versus ‘small farmers’, like male farmers versus female farmers) is inefficient and that the reallocation of resources (in favour of ‘small farmers’, as in the case of female farmers) will improve static efficiency, enhance agricultural growth and reduce poverty. Both arguments abstract from a very small number of empirical studies (Berry and Cline's 1979 work is the reference for the inverse relationship between farm size and productivity; Udry's work is the reference for the inefficiency of gender inequality), and then generalise to a ‘mythical uniform terrain’ (sub-Saharan Africa, the world).33

Even if one agrees with some of the empirical findings on which they base their more generalised arguments (the efficiency of the ‘small farmer’, the gender inequalities in intra-household resource allocation) it is the way in which those facts are read and interpreted which raises serious questions. For example, the efficiency of the ‘small farm’ (in specific contexts where it can be shown to operate) is surely a sign of distress and super-exploitation of ‘family labour’, most notably the labour of women, rather than being indicative of its technical superiority. In a similar way the inequalities in women's and men's access to certain resources (land, fertiliser), which neoclassical analyses of gender draw attention to, may be part of a larger and joint set of interests, even if these are inequitably distributed. This last point is elaborated by Whitehead and Kabeer in their critical review of Udry's work, to which I will return in final section. Last but not least, both sets of argument are ahistorical, ignoring the construction of class and gender inequalities as part of larger processes of accumulation and impoverishment in the context of foreign domination and capitalist transformation. This is inevitably linked to their methodological grounding in neoclassical economics.

Markets as gendered institutions

Global policy guidelines vis-à-vis agriculture, and with respect to land more specifically, as was noted earlier, have undergone important shifts in recent years. In the landmark policy statement by the World Bank on land in 1975, formal titling was seen as a precondition of modern agricultural development, while communal tenure systems were discouraged in favour of freehold titles.34 The argument essentially revolved not only around the efficiency- and equity-enhancing effects of tenure reform, but additionally land reform was seen as having wider developmental implications, given its contribution to wealth creation and accumulation. This model of state-led redistributive land reform had an uncomfortable place in the post-crisis ideological and fiscal environment, when state budgets were under severe constraint, and when redistribution was increasingly seen to be in conflict with efficiency and growth. While subsequent research both within the World Bank's Land Policy Division and beyond has led to what Whitehead and Tsikata describe as a more ‘nuanced, self-critical and empirically-foregrounded’ approach,35 especially towards customary systems of tenure (this is evident in the 2003 World Bank policy statement on land), the importance of land markets and individual tenure as the essential ingredients of agricultural productivity and growth continue to be underlined.

Given the centrality of land markets to the policy advice that is given to indebted governments (many of them in sub-Saharan Africa), it is important to ask if this prescription is likely to coincide with gender equality and women's land claims. In other words, how likely are low-income women to emerge as winners in the market-based land reform model and in land market transactions more broadly?

As was noted above, gender divisions and inequalities within domestic institutions (families, households) are now increasingly being recognised by many microeconomists. Ironically, however, the attentiveness to gender structures and hierarchies does not seem to extend to other institutions, notably markets. As generations of political economists and sociologists have shown, contrary to the abstract market of neoclassical textbooks, real markets are political (and social) constructs that are infused with social norms and regulations.36 Markets, with all their risks and variable performance, also embody gender hierarchies as they are found in society and its institutions. Although the empirical base is far from comprehensive, a judicious reading of the existing evidence points to the severe limitations of land markets as a channel for women's inclusion. It is of course important not to homogenise women as a social group; there are always groups of women, for example urban women in formal employment or women in peri-urban areas who grow food for city markets, who may have accumulated enough resources to purchase land in their own name with full property rights.37 But for the vast majority of women smallholders, market mechanisms are not likely to provide a channel for inclusion.

For sub-Saharan Africa Lastarria-Cornhiel's examination of the continent-wide evidence for the effects of land privatisation points to women as the largest group who have had little to gain from the trend toward privatised land tenure systems.38 In fact, the transformation of African tenure systems has tended to further weaken women's already tenuous claims to land, while other groups (community leaders and male household heads) have been able to strengthen their control over land to the detriment of women and some minority groups. Like Platteau,39 she argues that, while previously a number of persons and community groups held different rights to a piece of land, with privatisation most of those rights are brought together and claimed by one person. In this process women have tended to lose out. The fact that women enter the market system with no property, little cash income, minimal political power, and a family to maintain, works to their disadvantage. Simple titling and land registration do not in themselves transform a customary tenure system into a freehold one—other changes are also needed for this to happen, namely the commercialisation of agriculture and the development of a land market.40 Hence it is the general processes of privatisation and concentration that affect women's land and property rights negatively, rather than national land registration schemes per se.

The conclusion drawn by Whitehead and Tsikata's comprehensive review of the gender and land literature for sub-Saharan Africa, namely that in ‘the development of private property regimes of any kind, sub-Saharan African women tend to lose the rights they once had … either because their opportunities to buy land are very limited, or because local-level authorities practice gender discrimination’ is sobering.41 It has become even more important to underline this statement given the extent to which policy documents across the political spectrum advocate a blanket policy mix of private property rights and land-titling not only to encourage investment and foster a more efficient land market, but as a solution to women's weak and tenuous place within land tenure institutions.

Have land markets been more inclusive of women in other regional and country settings? For six countries in Latin America, Deere and Léon provide a useful database—something that is missing for many other countries and regions—on different modes of land acquisition (through inheritance, community, state, market, other) disaggregated by sex.42 The data show that, in these six countries, women tend to become landowners mainly through inheritance, while men do so through purchase in land markets (predictably, men are also privileged when land is acquired through the state).

Have women fared any better in so-called market-friendly land reform programmes? Here reference will be made to the recent South African experience that attempted to meld a strong commitment to the goal of social justice, including gender equality, with the principles of market-led land reform. As is by now well known, the intense negotiations around land reform led to a compromise solution or ‘elite-pacted settlement’: restitution and redistribution were endorsed but within the constraints of a market-led programme informed by a ‘willing seller/willing buyer’ principle and by protection for existing property rights. It is also widely recognised that the land reform programme was strongly influenced by the World Bank and its advisors, even in the absence of debt-related conditionalities.

There have been, as many predicted, severe constraints within this framework on effectively redistributing land, given the state's inability, within the market-friendly straightjacket, to acquire and redistribute productive land proactively and on a sufficiently large scale. Indeed, by March 2005 less than 3.5% of the area designated as ‘commercial farmland’ had been redistributed,43 and random surveys of beneficiary households ‘showed that their characteristics were very different to those of the average rural African household’.44 What is perhaps not always recognised is that a strictly demand-driven programme also conflicts with the policy aim of reaching women (and other marginalised social groups), because it overlooks how power relations and divisions within communities structure ‘demand’.45 It effectively commits the state to respond to applications from social groups that are already constituted, in which it is likely that women's role will be a marginal and dependent one. Thus in South Africa gender equality has been reflected in what Walker calls ‘first tier’ policy documents such as the White Paper on land. Yet, at the level of implementation, as her detailed research unravels, the commitment to gender equality has been far less evident.46 The neglect of gender concerns at these different levels of implementation is attributed to several factors, including institutional and operational weaknesses, absence of political accountability for gender equality at the highest level, and the relative weakness of the women's movement, especially in rural areas, since 1994.

The above evidence, though far from conclusive, nevertheless seems to suggest that gender advocates should have serious reservations about land markets, both formal and informal, as an effective mechanism for women's inclusion. This is particularly the case in sub-Saharan Africa, where the introduction of exclusive (individual) ownership rights to land, sometimes spearheaded by land titling and registration programmes, under both colonial rule and after independence, have marked a setback for women and other marginalised social groups such as pastoralists and those belonging to minority tribes. Why then have women's rights advocates in some contexts fought for the rights of women to be able to inherit, purchase and own land in their own name while rejecting the customary forms of land tenure which they claim have strongly discriminated against women, in the context of recent policy efforts to liberalise land tenure institutions?

An interesting example of such advocacy comes from Tanzania, where gender advocates entered into alliance with the National Land Forum in 1998 to ensure that both gender and other equality concerns in the Land Bills were addressed. The grand coalition known as the Land Coalition soon had to face the fact that there were serious differences within it, however. There were many divisive issues, but the most relevant for the present discussion were the disagreements with respect to liberalisation policies and the risks entailed by land markets. The other issue that divided the coalition centred on discriminatory customary law rules, how they should be reformed and what powers should be vested in state and village level land management and adjudication institutions.47 Some women's rights advocates were critical of the liberalisation agenda, given the highly adverse implications of private property regimes for resource-constrained women. Others, however, did not share this dim view of land markets. In fact, some of the most influential gender advocacy groups supported the liberalisation of land markets and land titling as opportunities for women to purchase land on an individual basis.

In this process accusations were directed at women's rights advocates for being ‘middle class’, ‘aid-dependent’ and influenced by their ‘Western sponsors’. However, as Tsikata rightly points out, such assertions ignore the fact that the majority of civil society advocacy groups in Africa, as in many other regions, share these characteristics. The issue about class composition of the dominant women's groups raised by Manji, namely that the middle class position of women's rights advocates limits their capacity to engage with an issue which concerns poorer women most and also creates a conflict of interest because they stand to gain from liberalisation in ways that resource-constrained rural women do not is also questionable. Historically one of the features of feminist movements has been their predominantly middle class composition. Yet this has rarely stopped them from advocating radical measures that often conflict with their own ‘class interests’—such as better wages and working conditions for women workers, especially domestic and care workers (on whom many middle class women depend for their own professional and political advancement).

A fair probing of the positions taken by women's rights advocates in national debates on land tenure reform would have to be cognisant of the concerns that many of these groups have about how ‘customary practices’ are being used to undermine rather than enhance women's tenure security. Indeed, Tripp claims that in Uganda ‘Purchasing land has, in effect, become a way of circumventing the traditional authorities’.48 Other women's rights advocates point out that liberalisation of land, whatever its risks and merits, is already underway and hence women should seek to gain a place in the emerging markets—this kind of position, rather than being simply a reflection of middle class interests, may be indicative of their pragmatism.

Yet while women's rights advocates are rightly concerned about the ways in which ‘traditionalist’ discourses and ‘customary’ practices are frequently used to deprive women of equal rights, seeing the constraints that women farmers face only in terms of the legal framework is limiting. While having an enabling legal framework is no doubt important, it is far from sufficient. Women's constrained access to non-land resources (credit, extension services, labour markets) also contributes to their precarious economic situation. As Whitehead has shown for sub-Saharan Africa, even though women farmers farm much less land than men do, this is not always because women are prevented from accessing land; it is also because they lack capital to hire labour, purchase inputs and access marketing channels.49

How are the institutional biases in marketing channels, government extension services, credit provision going to be tackled so that women can be more equitably included? These questions are often left out in women's rights advocacy around land, while the legal requirements for land access or ownership tend to assume disproportionate attention. To address these critical issues of institutional bias and power inequalities would require a broader analytical framework—one that is not so narrowly fixated on law and legal regimes.

The evidence and debates on ‘customary’ law and ‘decentralised’ land management, including their purported biases against women, constitute a complex arena to which the paper now briefly turns.

The turn to ‘the local’

In sub-Saharan Africa much land distribution and land access is governed by locally managed systems of ‘customary’ rights. As was noted earlier, in the 1980s the international financial institutions identified the absence of private property rights in land as a barrier to agricultural growth, and gave full support to privatisation, titling and registration of land. Yet subsequent research carried out by the World Bank and the Land Tenure Centre at the University of Wisconsin showed insignificant differences in the productivity and investment of lands held in freehold title compared with those held under customary tenure.50 Received wisdom within the World Bank's Land Policy Division has thus been swinging in favour of ‘building on customary tenures and existing institutions’,51 even though individual land titling still routinely appears in policy documents advising borrowing governments on the need for further liberalisation.52

At the other end of the political spectrum, for some of the more ‘progressive’ donor agencies and policy advocates such as Osfam and the National Land Forum in Tanzania, subsidiarity and devolution are key objectives in current land reform policy. Given the history of political abuse and processes of land alienation and ‘land grabbing’ facilitated by national political elites, they claim that it is best that decisions on land management and control be taken at the lowest levels possible, ‘closer to home’ in the words of the Shivji Commission in Tanzania.53 Here ‘the local’ is seen as a site of resistance against the state (and international capital). This approach fits the general support that many of the ‘progressive’ donor organisations and international NGOs provide for ‘participation’, ‘building of local capacities’, and ‘local-level democracy’.

Yet from the perspective of gender equality the local state is in a very ‘ambiguous position’.54 It is the part of the state that is located closest to ‘the people’, as many of the advocates of decentralisation claim, facilitating its engagement with women as well. Nevertheless, precisely because of its closeness to society, the local state can also become too closely intertwined with social institutions and existing power structures, and hence subject to ‘elite capture’.

There is very little discussion, however, as Whitehead and Tsikata show, among those who support decentralisation as to how the proposed local-level systems might work in practice, including their capacity to deliver more equitable (and especially gender-equitable) resource allocation. While there is ample evidence of women using social relations and local-level land management fora for making strong claims to land, ‘the weight of evidence suggests that economic changes have resulted in women's diminished access to land’.55 In Uganda, for example, women's recent mobilisation for a ‘co-ownership clause’ was in response to the current legislation and practices, which provide ‘limited possibilities for women to own land’, even if that land has been jointly acquired with her husband; a husband may still leave his wife with no land and therefore no source of subsistence.56 Tripp argues that women's movement leaders in Uganda do not see customary law and practices ‘as nearly as neutral and malleable as have been suggested at times by scholars and policymakers’.57 In some parts of the country competition over shrinking resources has intensified the patriarchal tendencies of the lineage system, even though conditions differ across the country.

Similar concerns were voiced by women's rights advocates in the Tanzanian debates to which reference has already been made. They argued that the preservation of customary law would be at odds with women's rights because it would exclude women from inheriting clan lands as well as violating the joint property provision of the 1971 Marriage Act. A study commissioned by the Ministry of Community Development, Women's Affairs and Children, jointly with the World Bank, found that female-headed households were being excluded from access to clan lands. They also found that purchasing land was a possibility rarely exercised because of the lack of resources.58 Women were reported to be generally unhappy with the local administration bodies ‘for reasons of corruption, under-representation of women and bias against them arising from prejudices and ideologies which cast them as less reliable protectors of clan land than men’.59

Parallel apprehensions about local authorities are echoed in a series of consultation meetings that the National Land Committee (nlc) and the Programme for Agrarian Studies at the University of Western Cape (South Africa) held with rural communities about the Communal Land Rights Bill during 2002 and 2003.60 Here too, many women recounted the difficulties they faced in trying to secure land allocations from traditional leaders, especially if the claimant was a single mother or a widow. Traditional leaders often justified their reluctance to allocate land to single mothers by reference to the danger of ‘outside’ men gaining rights in the community via marriage.61

This is not to suggest that ‘customary’ practices are bad for women, while statutory rights can further their interests. Many commentators refer to the practice of ‘forum shopping’—referring to the overlaps between formal legal systems and so-called customary ones, and the fact that individuals are using different courts and other dispute-settlement fora and using arguments grounded in either ‘customary’ or modernist principles, whichever is to their advantage.62 Outcomes depend not only on power dynamics on the ground, but also on the kinds of structure that are being put in place, and the role of the state as a major actor.63 It is nevertheless difficult to insert gender-equality concerns (or broader social-equality concerns) into these processes where traditional institutions have a patriarchal character—even in a seemingly best-case scenario such as South Africa.

Women's rights advocates in South Africa have had serious apprehensions about the place given to ‘traditional authorities’ in rural local government. The concerns are rooted in the anc's attempts since 1994 to accommodate some of the demands of the Inkatha Freedom Party (ifp) with its stronghold in rural KwaZulu Natal, as well as anc's reluctance to alienate the traditional authorities, given their perceived importance in delivering rural constituencies to the party.64 Given the fact that the ‘traditionalism’ that is espoused by ifp and many of its adherents in the Tribal Authorities is deeply patriarchal (and a product of colonial and apartheid policies), these political maneuverings have effectively blunted anc's commitments to gender equity in rural affairs.65 In 2000 the new Minister for Agriculture and Land Affairs, in notable contrast to the ministry's modernising agenda for the commercial sector, advocated building on ‘existing local institutions and structures’ in the communal areas.66

February 2004 saw the stormy passage through parliament of the long-delayed Communal Land Rights Act (clra), to the dismay of its critics (which included the Commission on Gender Equality as well as land-sector ngos and community groups). The critics argued that the legislation would entrench the powers of undemocratic ‘traditional authorities’ over communal land, fail to secure the tenure rights of women living on this land, and ultimately undermine the significant role that common property resources play in the livelihood strategies of the rural poor.67

This was followed by another Act, the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Act (tlgfa), which deems existing tribal authorities to be traditional councils, provided they meet new composition requirements within a year. It is likely that a lasting legacy of these two Acts will be ‘to bolster the power of traditional leaders relative to that of the holders and users of family or individual land rights’, and to ‘harden the terrain’ within which rural people, and especially rural women, struggle for change.68 There are widespread concerns that the two Acts pre-empt rural people's right to choose their own representatives on the same basis as people living in other parts of the country, and that, because women's 30% quota does not need to be elected, it could lead to the selection by traditional leaders of acquiescent females to sit on traditional councils.69

‘Local’ justice and ‘custom’ can indeed defy women's rights with impunity, as Khadiagala found in the case of Kigesi women in Uganda.70 There, given the patrilocal nature of marriages, if a woman takes a marital land dispute to a Local Council court she is likely to face a court that is filled by the relatives and friends of her husband. What kind of political dynamics, then, are being unleashed by the re-turn to ‘the customary’, and the revival of ‘traditional’ authorities? As Whitehead and Tsikata rightly warn, these could have highly disempowering implications for rural African women and their claims on resources. The main problem, as they vehemently argue, is that women have too little political voice at all the decision-making levels that are implied by the land question: not only within formal law and government, but also within local-level management systems.

Questions regarding traditional authorities aside, there are many warnings across the literature that ‘the local’ can indeed be a site of unequal rural social relations, with crucial implications for women and other less powerful social groups. Although there can be many benefits to decentralisation, its advocates (who cut across the political spectrum) often neglect the prevalence of inequitable repressive local power structures, as well as the acute scarcity of resources in many localities, even if those available locally were equitably redistributed.71 Pressures from local organisations such as labour unions or neighbourhood associations, where they exist, can in some circumstances bring about positive social change and hasten national reforms, but it is often a long, slow process punctuated by setbacks and violent repression.

Not surprisingly some of the social movements that are struggling for land redistribution at the local level are often more aware of the importance of having the weight of the federal government behind them, and also more attentive to the risks and dangers of local government capture by powerful vested interests. One of the initiatives of the government of Fernando Enrique Cardoso in Brazil was to decentralise agrarian reform, devolving greater responsibility for its planning and execution to state and local governments. But there was very little follow-up to this initiative, primarily because of the resistance of the rural social movements to decentralisation.72 The rural social movements were reportedly worried that the federal government would abdicate responsibility for leading the cause of agrarian reform, and that the power of landlords at the local level would be sufficient to stop any significant redistribution of land from taking place if the initiative was left to the state and local governments.

Land and labour in multiple and diversified livelihoods

There have been many serious questions about the ‘small’ or ‘family’ farming vision that underpins neoclassical (and neoliberal) arguments for land reform, whether articulated by the World Bank or by advocates such as Keith Griffin and colleagues. Many of the criticisms point to the weak empirical foundations on which the central propositions of these advocates rest: the so-called relative efficiency of small-farm production (the ‘inverse relationship between farm size and productivity’),73 and the alleged ‘multiplier effects’ of land reform (agro-industrial growth linkages), whereby small-farm agriculture is supposed to stimulate the creation of non-farm jobs within rural regions.74 These are the building blocks of the ‘win-win’ scenario which are weak on the empirical and theoretical front, if not entirely ‘utopian’, ‘populist’ and ‘ideological’.75

These justified and potent criticisms of neoclassical accounts of agrarian structures and institutions and remedies for rural poverty point to the need for situated analyses of different paths of capitalist transformation in the countryside. What emerges from both Marxist and non-Marxist analyses of capitalist transformation, and indeed one important requirement of successful agrarian transitions, is the shift of labour from agriculture to industry. The historical record of advanced industrialised countries, as Byres reminds us, confirms this view, even though the paths taken have been diverse. And as he goes on to show, what is striking about contemporary developing countries is the limited extent to which capitalist industrialisation, even where it is proceeding, is able to absorb labour.76

However, as Bernstein warns, ‘The potency of “models” inspired by particular historical experiences consists in how they are generalized and applied’ and, in particular, whether such application ‘facilitates or hinders analysis of the dynamics of other times and places, including what may be “changing before our very eyes”’.77

One striking feature of agrarian change and industrialisation in contemporary developing societies to which many observers have drawn attention is the growing prevalence of what is sometimes referred to as livelihood diversification, defined as ‘the process by which rural families construct a diverse portfolio of activities and social support capabilities in their struggle for survival and in order to improve their standard of living’.78 Diversification captures several different economic processes and its blanket use to describe all forms of non-farm employment is misleading. It is particularly important, from the point of view of thinking about poverty, to distinguish between diversification as a survival strategy (which it very often is) and diversification that feeds into a process of accumulation. The fact that ‘poorer countries today confront more formidable barriers to comprehensive industrialization—and a fortiori to the generation of comparable levels of industrial employment—than did the advanced industrial countries in the past’,79 is an important part of what drives this process. For vast sections of the population, both female and male, this means a constant search for income through wage work and ‘self-employment’ (often thinly disguised forms of wage work) away from the village. Thus work on the household plot (if there is one) becomes articulated with other forms of activity (paid and unpaid, formal and informal, industrial and service) and with other sources of income beyond the agricultural sector and indeed very often beyond the confines of the village.80

In a very insightful analysis of the South African land reform programme Hart exposed not only the spurious claims of the World Bank and its advisors about the ‘efficiency of small farms’ and the alleged ‘non-agricultural spin-offs’ from small family farms, but vehemently argued in favour of a broadly based agrarian reform that supported multiple livelihoods whereby access to land can effectively underwrite the money wage—by providing some security in times of unemployment and in old age.81 For her, therefore, the significance of land is closely intertwined with the labour question, or the ‘fragmentation of labour’ as Bernstein calls it.

It is within this context that we need to place some of the contemporary demands for land ‘from below’—for example through spontaneous land occupations, or in the form of collective mobilisations, or even through survivalist clamouring for land, as documented by Kandiyoti for Uzbekistan.82 In the latter context, in a situation where collective enterprises have not been able to pay their workers’ wages, rural households, and rural women in particular, have fallen back on household and subsidiary plots for self-subsistence and survival. But women's current land hunger, as Kandiyoti emphatically underscores, must be understood in the context of both a wish to reinstate the terms of their former social contract with collective enterprises (as formal employees, which included a wide range of social benefits) and their despair given the lack of viable employment opportunities.

There is a tendency within the literature to pose land and employment in binary opposition: are employment opportunities more important for women or access to and ownership of land? Sender and Johnson, for example, advance two sets of arguments: first, that small-scale family farming, and land reform, deliver very little employment and income benefits to low-income women; and, second, that poor women stand to benefit much more from large-scale capitalist agriculture. The issue of employment opportunities, and its terms and conditions within capitalist agriculture, are critical ones as far as low-income rural women are concerned, whether their households own some land or not. The problem, however, as the authors themselves seem to acknowledge, are the terms and conditions of much of the work on offer, even within the more modern and technologically advanced farms producing horticultural products (in countries such as Mexico and Columbia, as well as in Kenya, Uganda and South Africa).

Corporate farms use a gender-segregated workforce, within which women are overwhelmingly employed in more insecure, less well paid and lower-skilled activities, without opportunities for advancement. The work is very often seasonal, with long hours of work, poor health and safety conditions and no social protection. The use of toxic inputs without adequate training and protective clothing is identified as a major health risk. In some countries producing high-value agricultural exports (including South Africa, Chile and Argentina) there has been a notable rise in the use of contract labour, both male and female, hired by third-party contractors. This reduces labour costs and facilitates the flexibility of export production as contractors move their teams from site to site.83 Last but not least, the numbers of workers employed in these capitalist farms vary greatly across countries, from as low as 3000 workers in Uganda to 1.2 million workers in Mexico, with South Africa falling somewhere towards the higher end of the spectrum (280 000).84

Sender and Johnson do not seem to dispute these largely negative trends as far as employment conditions within capitalist agriculture are concerned. For example, they point to the strategies employed by large-scale horticultural operations in the Free State and Eastern Transvaal Provinces of South Africa to recruit a workforce that is predominantly ‘female, foreign and casual … not because of any local shortage at the going wage rate in the supply of female labour with similar levels of skill and experience, but because of their relatively weak bargaining power and the ease with which they could be controlled and disciplined’.85 Policies to promote ‘decently remunerated agricultural wage employment in Africa, as elsewhere, would require far higher levels of public investment and a much more interventionist state than the current consensus is prepared to contemplate’86—but what is to be done in the meantime, and is it not precisely because of the absence of such conditions that those deprived of decent employment or even a living wage, poor women among them, resort to land occupations or simply ‘cry for land’ in the words of Kandiyoti?87

The other important argument advanced by Sender and Johnson concerns the supposed efficiency of idealised small family farms, because it is an institutional form that has been capable of applying huge amounts of very low productivity labour to tiny parcels of land. ‘The “viability” of most small family farms in Africa’, they argue, ‘is predicated on compulsion, either exercised by men over the labour of women, younger men and destitute kin, or enforced by acute risks of starvation that necessitate the severe exploitation of family labour’.88 The contested issue of ‘compulsion’ within family-based households, especially as an aspect of intrahousehold gender relations, deserves further attention because it is one that reverberates across otherwise very different accounts of household-based agricultural production—both neoclassical, as we saw earlier emanating from gender advocates within the World Bank, as well as in political economy analyses such as those of Sender and Johnson. We turn to this question below.

Rethinking the agrarian household: compulsion, bargaining and connectedness

There is little consensus among gender experts as to whether individual titles or joint titles would serve women's interests better. Agarwal, for example, considers joint titles to be problematic (in the Indian context at least): they make it difficult for women to gain control over the produce, to bequeath the land as they want, and to claim their share in case of marital conflict. She sees individual titles as better able to provide women with flexibility in pursuing their own agendas. However, given some of the problems that resource-strained women smallholders with individual titles might confront—for example, their lack of investible funds, and the difficulties of investing in capital equipment if the farm is small—the optimum institutional arrangement would be some collective form of investment and cultivation that would bring women smallholders together, thereby cutting across households (rather than being based on the household unit itself).

Reflecting on the South African context, Walker admits that, even where women have been listed as independent household heads and as beneficiaries in their own right, their access to land has been mediated overwhelmingly through their membership in patriarchal households. Nevertheless, sceptical of individual rights as the solution (which is a component of the Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development (lrad) issued in November 2000), she presses for a deeper appreciation of the importance of household membership in poor women's lives, and thus the importance of ensuring women's rights to household resources. Had the lrad framework, with its emphasis on individual rights, been in place from the start of the land reform programme, very few, if any, of the women in the present beneficiary communities would have been able to access land through it—‘they are simply too poor, too isolated and too dependent on male authority to be able to establish individual rights to land’.89

Moreover, many women beneficiaries endorse the household model implicit in Department of Land Affairs (dla's) work, and some have struggled very hard to secure their household's interests. While a minority seemed interested in the idea of individual titles, de-linked from that of their husbands or families, few saw this as the solution to their problems. They were more interested in mechanisms that would secure and extend their rights to household resources, through joint titles, inheritance rights for their daughters and copies of title deeds.90

It is clear from the above statements that the question about joint or individual titles is in fact not as straightforward as it first appears. Implicitly it is a question about how conjugal relations and the forces that bind agrarian households together are understood. The two positions, outlined above, bring to the fore some of the tensions within the current, second-generation feminist conceptualisations of the household, where the first-generation critique has established, in both theoretical and empirical terms, serious flaws in the previously dominant unified household paradigm.91 While gender analysis sees households as sites of struggle and inequality, there is far less agreement as to how the given inequalities and tensions, as well as common interests and co-operative behaviour, should be understood. Do conflictual and bargaining models sufficiently capture the common interests that all household members have in the overall economic success of their households? Do women work on their household plots because ‘older men prevent them from leaving their farms in search of more productive employment’ as Sender and Johnson claim?92 What makes women and junior men stay inside the patriarchal household, even though they are allocated fewer resources, take on heavy work loads of largely ‘unpaid labour’ and enjoy less leisure time? Is it despotism on the part of the male household head, and ‘false consciousness’ on the part of the junior household members, that binds the household together?93

These are not questions to which any definitive answers can be given. But there are powerful arguments for seeing households as ‘maximizing a range of utilities—these might include capacity for diversification, flexibility in the case of agro-climatic shocks, other kinds of risk spreading (against illness and death, for example), long term investments, social reproduction and so on and so forth’.94

Why has it been difficult for women to mobilise around individual land rights? On the one hand, in many cultural contexts access to and ownership of land is closely intertwined with male gender identities. In order to claim land, therefore, women require both support and government action that establishes the legitimacy of their claims. On the other hand, women may be reluctant to embark on either collective mobilisations or individual agitation to claim individual rights to land because membership in a household provides them with a range of material and non-material benefits, and hence they are more interested in strengthening their household's access to resources, including land.

While intra-household inequalities in access to resources are well documented, this does not mean that a woman's level of well-being is unrelated to that of her husband or partner. Women's and men's interests within marriage are both joint and separate, which is what makes gender struggles so complex. What many women seem to be saying in the case studies reviewed for this paper is that they want to redress the inequalities in gender relations that hamper their access to household resources and impinge negatively on their security, and not necessarily to opt out of the household in order to make it on their own in isolation.

Notes

This paper partially draws on the unrisd research project ‘Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights’. Some of the findings of the project were brought together in a special issue of the Journal of Agrarian Change, 3 (1 – 2), 2003. See also S Razavi, ‘Introduction: agrarian change, gender and land rights’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 3 (4), 2003, pp 2 – 32. The present paper has benefited from the comments of an anonymous journal referee.

1 C Jackson, ‘Rescuing gender from the poverty trap’, World Development, 24 (3), 1996, pp 489 – 504.

2 The phrase ‘conjugal contract’ is taken from A Whitehead, ‘“I'm hungry Mum”: the politics of domestic budgeting’, in K Young, C Wolkowitz & R McCullagh (eds), Of Marriage and the Market, London: Routledge, 1981.

3 AK Sen, ‘Gender and cooperative conflicts’, in Irene Tinker (ed), Persistent Inequalities, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

4 B Agarwal, ‘Gender and land rights revisited: exploring new prospects via the state, family and market’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 3 (1 – 2), 2003, pp 184 – 224.

5 CD Deere & M Leon, ‘Who owns the land? Gender and land-titling programmes in Latin America’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 1 (3), 2001, pp 440 – 467.

6 A Manji, The Politics of Land Reform in Africa: From Communal Tenure to Free Markets, London: Zed Books, 2006, p 52 (author's emphasis).

7 On the ‘rule of law’ rhetoric emanating from the international financial institutions and its intellectual origins in Weberian sociology, see F Upham, ‘Ideology, experience, and the rule of law in developing societies’, in M J-E Woo (ed), After the Miracle: Neoliberalism and Institutional Reform in East Asia, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007.

8 C Nyamu-Musembi, For or Against Gender Equality? Evaluating the Post-Cold War ‘Rule of Law’ Reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa, OP 7, Geneva: unrisd, 2005.

9 T Mkandawire, ‘Good governance: the itinerary of an idea’, Development and Cooperation, 31 (10), 2004, at http://www.inwent.org/E+Z/content/archive-eng/10-2004/tribune_art1.html, accessed 30 May 2007.

10 F Butegwa, cited in A Whitehead & D Tsikata, ‘Policy discourses on women's land rights in sub-Saharan Africa: the implications of the return to the customary’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 3 (1 – 2), 2003, pp 67 – 112.

11 Whitehead & Tsikata, ‘Policy discourses on women's land rights in sub-Saharan Africa’.

12 For an analysis of these issues in the recent land tenure reforms in Tanzania, see A Manji, ‘Gender and the politics of the land reform processes in Tanzania’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 36 (4), 1998, pp 645 – 667; and D Tsikata, ‘Securing women's interests within land tenure reforms: recent debates in Tanzania’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 3 (1 – 2), 2003, pp 149 – 183.

13 CD Deere, ‘Women's land rights and social movements in the Brazilian agrarian reform’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 3 (1 – 2), 2003, pp 257 – 288.

14 Ibid, p 259.

15 S Greenberg, The Landless People's Movement and the Failure of Post-apartheid Land Reform, case study for the ukzn project ‘Globalization, Marginalization and the New Social Movements in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, University of KwaZulu Natal, 2004, p 28.

16 World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth, Washington, DC: World Bank, 1989.

17 unrisd, Gender Equality: Striving for Justice in an Unequal World, Geneva: unrisd, 2005, Figure 6.1.

18 G Abalu & R Hassin, ‘Agricultural productivity and natural resource use in Southern Africa’, Food Policy, 23 (6), 1999, pp 477 – 490.

19 CD Deere, The Feminization of Agriculture? Economic Restructuring in Rural Latin America, OP No 1, Geneva: unrisd, 2005.

20 World Bank, Adjustment in Africa: Reforms, Results and the Road Ahead, Washington, DC: World Bank, 1994.

21 M Karshenas, ‘“Urban bias”, intersectoral resource flows and the macroeconomic implications of agrarian relations: the historical experience of Japan and Taiwan’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 4 (1 – 2), 2004, pp 170 – 189.

22 M Spoor, ‘Policy regimes and performance of the agricultural sector in Latin America and the Caribbean during the last three decades’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 2 (3), 2002, pp 382 – 401.

23 T Byres, ‘Structural change, the agrarian question and the possible impact of globalization’, in J Ghosh & CP Chandrasekhar (eds), Work and Well-being in the Age of Finance, New Delhi: Tulika, 2003.

24 Ibid, p 200.

25 KS Jomo, Globalization, Liberalization and Equitable Development: Lessons from East Asia, OC Paper No 3, Geneva: unrisd, 2003; and H-J Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective, London: Anthem Press, 2002.

26 The literature on intra-household gender inequalities is extensive. Prominent contributions include N Folbre, ‘Hearts and spades: paradigms of household economics’, World Development, 14 (2), 1986, pp 245 – 255; N Kabeer, Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought, London: Verso, 1994; B Agarwal, ‘“Bargaining” and gender relations: within and beyond the household’, Feminist Economics, 3 (1), 1997, pp 1 – 50; and Whitehead, ‘“I'm, hungry Mum”’.

27 J Bruce & D Dwyer, A Home Divided: Women and Income in the Third World, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988.

28 The policy documents making such arguments include M Blackden & C Bhanu, Gender, Growth and Poverty Reduction: 1998 Africa Poverty Status Report, World Bank for the Special Program of Assistance for Africa, Washington, DC: World Bank, 1999. The argument has been further generalised beyond sub-Saharan Africa in a key policy document, World Bank, Engendering Development Through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources and Voice, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

29 Particularly important in sustaining the World Bank position on the inefficiencies of gender inequality is C Udry & H Alderman, ‘Gender differentials in farm productivity: implications for household efficiency and agricultural policy’, Food Policy, 20 (2), 1995, pp 407 – 423; and C Udry, ‘Gender, agricultural production, and the theory of the household’, Journal of Political Economy, 104 (5), pp 1010 – 1046.

30 A good example of this up-take comes from the 2003 World Bank policy statement on land. World Bank, Land Policies for Growth and Poverty Reduction, World Bank Policy Research Report, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003.

31 For a critical scrutiny of these studies, see B O'Laughlin, ‘A bigger piece of a very small pie: intrahousehold resource allocation and poverty reduction in Africa’, Development and Change, 38 (1), 2007, pp 21 – 44; and A Whitehead & N Kabeer, Living with Uncertainty: Gender, Livelihoods and pro-poor Growth in Rural Sub-Saharan Africa, ids Working Paper 134, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, 2001. For an earlier argument, see M Lockwood, Engendering Adjustment or Adjusting Gender? Some New Approaches to Women and Development in Africa, Discussion Paper No 315, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, 1992.

32 K Griffin, AR Khan & A Ickowitz, ‘Poverty and the distribution of land’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 2 (3), 2002, pp 279 – 330.

33 RA Berry & WR Cline, Agrarian Structure and Productivity in Developing Countries, Baltimore and London: John Hopkins Press, 1979; C Udry, ‘Gender, agricultural production and the theory of the household'; O'Laughlin, ‘A bigger piece of a very small pie’, p 40.

34 World Bank, Land Reform Policy, Washington, DC: Land Policy Division, World Bank, 1997.

35 Whitehead & Tsikata, ‘Policy discourses on women's land rights in sub-Saharan Africa’, p 83.

36 K Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957; and H-J Chang, Breaking the Mould: An Institutional Political Economy Alternative to the Neoliberal Theory of the Market and the State, SPD No 6, Geneva: unrisd, 2001.

37 S Lastarria-Cornhiel, ‘Impact of privatization on gender and property rights in Africa’, World Development, 25 (8), 1997, pp 1317 – 1333.

38 Ibid.

39 J-P Platteau, Reforming Land Rights in Sub-Saharan Africa: Issues of Efficiency and Equity, Discussion Paper No 60, Geneva: unrisd, 1995.

40 Lastarria-Cornhiel, ‘Impact of privatization on gender and property rights in Africa’.

41 Whitehead & Tsikata, ‘Policy discourses on women's land rights in sub-Saharan Africa’, p 79.

42 CD Deere & M Leon, ‘The gender asset gap: land in Latin America’, World Development, 31 (6), 2003, pp 925 – 947, see Table 6.2.

43 Cherryl Walker, personal communication, December 2005.

44 Deininger & May and Deininger et al, cited in J Sender & D Johnson, ‘Searching for a weapon of mass production in rural Africa: unconvincing arguments for land reform’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 4 (1 – 2), 2004, p 157.

45 C Walker, ‘Piety in the sky? Gender policy and land reform in South Africa’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 3 (1 – 2), 2003, pp 113 – 148.

46 Ibid, p 123.

47 Detailed analyses of these debates are provided by Manji, ‘Gender and the politics of the land reform processes in Tanzania’; and Tsikata, ‘Securing women's interests within land tenure reforms’.

48 AM Tripp, ‘Women's movements, customary law, and land rights in Africa: the case of Uganda’, African Studies Quarterly, 7 (4), 2004, p 4.

49 A Whitehead, Trade, Trade Liberalization and Rural Poverty in Low-Income Africa: A Gendered Account, Background Paper for the unctad 2001 Least Developed Countries Report, Geneva: unctad, 2001.

50 Mighot-Adholla et al, cited in Whitehead & Tsikata, ‘Policy discourses on women's land rights in sub-Saharan Africa’, p 82.

51 World Bank, Land Policies for Growth and Poverty Reduction, p 62.

52 Whitehead & Tsikata, ‘Policy discourses on women's land rights in sub-Saharan Africa, p 83.

53 Tsikata, ‘Securing women's interests within land tenure reform’.

54 J Beall, Decentralizing Government and Centralizing Gender in Southern Africa: Lessons from the South African Experience, Occasional Paper 8, Geneva: unrisd, 2005.

55 Whitehead & Tsikata, ‘Policy discourses on women's land rights in sub-Saharan Africa’, p 78.

56 Tripp, ‘Women's movements, customary law, and land rights in Africa’, p 6. The co-ownership amendment was in fact passed by the parliament but political manoeuvering on the grounds of technicalities led to a last-minute removal of the clause. It was the president, by his own omission, who decided to pull out the co-ownership clause because he foresaw a disaster. For details, see ibid.

57 Ibid, p 11.

58 Tsikata, ‘Securing women's interests within land tenure reform’, p 172.

59 Rwebangira et al, cited in ibid, p 172.

60 A Claassens, The Communal Land Rights Act and Women: Does the Act Remedy or Entrench Discrimination and the Distortion of the Customary?, Occasional Paper No 28, Cape Town: Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape, 2005.

61 Ibid, pp 18 – 21.

62 Whitehead & Tsikata, ‘Policy discourses on women's land rights in sub-Saharan Africa’, p 95.

63 Ibid, p 98.

64 Beall, Decentralizing Government and Centralizing Gender in Southern Africa.

65 Walker, ‘Piety in the sky?’.

66 Cited in C Walker, ‘Women, gender policy and land reform in South Africa’, Politikon, 32 (2), 2005, pp 297 – 315.

67 Ibid, p 297.

68 Claassens, The Communal Land Rights and Women, p 41.

69 Ibid, p 32.

70 LS Khadiagala, ‘The failure of popular justice in Uganda: local councils and women's property rights’, Development and Change, 32, 2001, pp 55 – 76.

71 S Barraclough, In Quest of Sustainable Development, OC No 4, Geneva: unrisd, 2005, p 34.

72 CD Deere & M León, Towards a Gendered Analysis of the Brazilian Agrarian Reform, Occasional Paper No 16, Storrs/Amherst, MA: Center for Latin American Studies, 1999.

73 See, in particular, T Byres, ‘Neo-classical neo-populism 25 years on: déjà vu and déjà passé. Towards a critique', Journal of Agrarian Change, 4 (1 – 2), 2004, pp 17 – 44; and Sender & Johnson, ‘Searching for a weapon of mass production in rural Africa’, for powerful criticisms of this genre of analysis.

74 G Hart, ‘The agrarian question and industrial dispersal in South Africa: agro-industrial linkages through Asian lenses’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 23 (2 – 3), 1996, pp 245 – 277.

75 Byres, 2004; Sender & Johnson, ‘Searching for a weapon of mass production in rural Africa’; and H Bernstein, ‘“Changing before our very eyes”: agrarian questions and the politics of land in capitalism today’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 4 (1 – 2), 2004, pp 190 – 225.

76 Byres, ‘Structural change, the agrarian question and the possible impact of globalization’.

77 H Berstein, “Changing before our very eyes”.

78 F Ellis, ‘Household strategies and rural livelihood diversification’, Journal of Development Studies, 35 (1), 1998, p 4. See also DF Bryceson, Sub-Saharan Africa Betwixt and Between: Rural Livelihood Practices and Policies, ASC Working Paper 43, Leiden: Africa-Studiecentrum, 1999.

79 Bernstein, “Changing before our very eyes”’, p 204.

80 For Africa, see Bryceson, Sub-Saharan Africa Betwixt and Between; and Whitehead, Trade, Trade Liberalization and Rural Poverty in Low-income Africa. For India, see J Breman, Footloose Labour: Working in India's Informal Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

81 Hart, ‘The agrarian question and industrial dispersal in South Africa’.

82 D Kandiyoti, Agrarian Reform, Gender and Land Rights in Uzbekistan, Programme on Social Policy and Development, Paper No 11, Geneva: unrisd, 2002; and Kandiyoti, ‘The cry for land: agrarian reform, gender and land rights in Uzbekistan’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 3 (4), 2003, pp 225 – 257.

83 Deere, 2005; C Dolan & K Sorby, Gender and Employment in High-Value Agricultural Industries, Agriculture and Rural Development, Working Paper Series No 7, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003; and A Barrientos & S Barrientos, Extending Social Protection to Informal Workers in the Horticulture Global Value Chain, Social Protection Discussion Paper Series No 0216, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2002.

84 Figures taken from Dolan & Sorby, Gender and Employment in High-Value Agricultural Industries.

85 Sender & Johnson, ‘Searching for a weapon of mass production in rural Africa’, p 154.

86 Ibid, p 159.

87 Kandiyoti, ‘The cry for land’.

88 Sender & Johnson, ‘Searching for a weapon of mass production in rural Africa’, p 148.

89 Walker, ‘Piety in the sky?’, p 143.

90 Ibid, pp 143 – 144.

91 The distinction between first-generation and second-generation feminist conceptualisations of the household should not be confused with the distinction between first wave and second wave women's movements.

92 Sender & Johnson, ‘Searching for a weapon of mass production in rural Africa’, p 148.

93 Whitehead & Kabeer, Living with Uncertainty.

94 Whitehead, Trade, Trade Liberalization and Rural Poverty in Low-Income Africa, p 19.