The Impact of Women's Mobilisation: Civil Society Organisations and the Implementation of Land Titling in Peru

Abstract

This article analyses how civil society organisations (CSOs) influenced the implementation of the National Land Titling Project (PETT) in Peru. Land titling projects such as PETT raise a number of questions about the social implications of formalisation. Women often are disadvantaged when it comes to land titling, due to several factors such as lack of legal documentation, illiteracy and the predominant gender division of labour. However, evaluations of the formalisation process in Peru show that there has been an increase in the incidence of joint ownership from the first phase of the implementation process to the second, even though the joint titling of land to couples was never adopted as official policy. Heavy criticism was raised towards PETT by feminist non-governmental organisations and social movements in the late nineties, promoting equal land rights. At the time of implementation, political changes were occurring in Peru, creating space for new actors, and a change in the extent of repression of collective actors. These changes seem to have created a good environment for action. Researchers mention the mobilisation as a possible explanation for the increase in joint ownership, suggesting that the activism of CSOs led the implementing agency to favour joint ownership between spouses. Uncovering the impacts of collective action requires close attention to the dynamic interplay between the capacities and strategies of CSOs and the political spaces for their claims and campaigns.

Keywords:

• civil society
• mobilisation
• social movements
• impact
• gender equality
• land rights
• collective action

Notes

¹Informants are identified by their affiliation: PETT (The Special Rural Cadastre and Land Titling Project), NCSO (national civil society organisation) and LCSO (local civil society organisation). See the reference list for further information about the positionality of the informants.

²The LSMS (Living Standards Measurement Surveys) has been carried out in a number of Latin American countries during the 1990s sponsored by the WB (Deere & León 2003).

³There are no pre-titling baseline surveys against which to measure the increase in joint ownership due to tilting. However, different sources indicate a large increase. The property cadastre only records the sex of the owners, not familiar relationship between them. By imposing reasonable assumptions, we find that the rate of jointly titled land between man and women increases from 44 per cent in PTRT1 to 57 per cent in PTRT2.

⁴Fuentes and Wiig (2009) furthermore find that 57 per cent of titled land to household with a couple is jointly held, while the corresponding figure is 49 per cent for untitled households.

⁵The phrase ‘…credit the solicitors rights to the parcel and, in their cases, of the spouse or cohabitant’ in DL667 from 1991 is repeated but not further specified in any later law or directive.