Capital, labor, and gender: the consequences of large-scale land transactions on household labor allocation

ABSTRACT

Contemporary large-scale land transactions (LSLTs), also called land grabs, are historically unprecedented in their scale and pace. They have provoked robust scholarly debates, yet studies of their gender-differentiated impacts remain more rare, particularly when it comes to how changes in control over land and resources affect women's labor, and thereby their livelihoods and well-being. Our comparative study of four LSLTs in western Ethiopia finds that the transactions led to substantial land use change, including relocation and decrease in size of smallholder parcels, loss of communally-held grazing lands, and loss of forests. These changes had far-reaching impacts on household labor allocation, the gendered division of labor, and household wellbeing. But their effects on women are both more adverse and more severe, expressed in terms of increased wage labor to make up for lost land and livestock, more time spent gathering firewood and water from increasingly distant locations, and an increased intensity of household responsibilities where male members underwent wage labor migration. These burdens led to negative psychological, corporal, and material effects on women living in and near transacted areas compared to their situation prior to transactions. This article both responds to the deficit in studies on the impacts of LSLTs on gendered livelihoods, labor relations, and wellbeing outcomes, and lays the groundwork for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Tenure changes
• gendered impacts
• agricultural investments
• Ethiopia

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Etenesh Mulu for her help in conducting focus groups and compiling transcripts, as well as all the focus group participants who were so willing and ready to tell us their stories.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Reem Hajjar is Assistant Professor of Integrated Human and Ecological Systems at the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society, in the College of Forestry, Oregon State University. She leads the Forests, Livelihoods, Institutions, and Governance (FoLIAGe) research group, and has authored a number of publications on community and small-scale forestry, forest and landscape governance, and forests and livelihoods.

Alemayehu Ayana is a researcher and director of Socio-economics, Policy, Extension, and Gender Research program at Ethiopian Environment and Forest Research Institute (EEFRI). He is an interdisciplinary scientist in the field of natural resource economics, environmental governance, policy analysis, and socio-economic study of land use and climate change. He (co)produced a number of academic publications on the subject of forest and environmental governance, economic and policy analysis, sustainable management of forest landscape.

Rebecca L. Rutt is a gender equality activist and Assistant Professor of European Environmental Policy at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Food and Resource Economics.

Omer Hinde holds an MSc in Rural Development from the University of Haramaya and is Division Coordinator for the Extension and Gender Research program of EEFRI. He dedicated his thesis to women's participation in farmer training centers. His areas of interest and research include socio-economic, institution and gender study in rural development aspects of Ethiopia. He has published his MSc thesis, and challenges and practices of Ethiopian bamboo cottage industries in journals.

Chuan Liao is Assistant Professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. His research aims to understand relationships among land, rights, and resources, as well as the causal mechanisms for achieving synergistic outcomes in agricultural production, environmental conservation, and smallholder livelihoods. Much of his work focuses on empirically examining the complexity in the coupled natural-human systems in order to test and refine theories in both natural and social sciences.

Stephanie Keene is an international development lawyer with expertise in community-based land tenure, rural women's rights and corporate compliance, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. As a Senior Tenure Analyst, Mrs. Keene leads the Rights and Resources Initiative's Tenure Tracking Program. Her international work and research span numerous contexts, including Indonesia, Sierra Leone, Senegal, and Uganda. Mrs. Keene received her Juris Doctor from Yale Law School and her undergraduate degree from Princeton University.

Solange Bandiaky-Badji is the Africa Program Director for the Rights and Resources Initiative. She leads the development of RRI's strategy for engagement in Africa with a focus on tenure rights. She holds a PhD in women's and gender studies from Clark University, and has published work on gender in relation to natural resource management, decentralization/local governance, forests and land reforms.

Arun Agrawal is Samuel Trask Dana Professor of Governance and Sustainability at the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. His work concerns the political economy of development, sustainability, and governance. He serves as the editor in chief of World Development. He was elected member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2018.

Notes

1 We acknowledge that having the local officers and community leaders select focus group participants may have introduced bias in our sample. However, it was difficult to avoid this sampling method given local culture and the short time frame that prevented more extended field presence.

2 Kebele is a lower administrative unit similar to a ward.

3 It should be evident that the changes in land tenure introduced by land transactions involving outside investors are very different from the normal tenure uncertainty that characterizes smallholder landholding in general in Ethiopia (Moreda 2018).

4 A lottery system of land allocation is a traditional practice exercised in many parts of the country especially in western Ethiopia. It is a system used to fairly distribute land of variable quality (in terms of fertility, access to irrigation, slope, etc). The system inadvertently served to promote gender equality in land distribution.

5 We did not come across any specific agreements between investors and the local communities – these agreements are commonly signed at the federal or state level. Expectations are largely based on the rhetoric heard from the government and investors on creating new job opportunities, introduction of new technologies, developing social services, etc.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Rights and Resources Initiative (Grant Number 4971); the National Science Foundation’s Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems program (Grant Number 1617364); the UK Department for International Development (Grant Number 203516-102); and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Land-Cover and Land-Use Change program (Grant Number NNX15AD40G).