Global Trends in Land Tenure Reform: Gender Impacts

This book explores the gendered dimensions of recent land governance transformations across the globe in the wake of unprecedented pressures on land and natural resources. These complex contemporary forces are reconfiguring livelihoods and impacting women’s positions, their tenure security and well-being, and that of their families. Bringing together fourteen empirical community case studies from around the world, the book examines governance transformations of land and land-based resources resulting from four major processes of tenure change: commercial land based investments, the formalization of customary tenure, the privatization of communal lands, and post-conflict resettlement and redistribution reforms. Each contribution carefully analyses the gendered dimensions of these transformations, exploring both the gender impact of the land tenure reforms and the social and political economy within which these reforms materialize. The cases provide important insights for decision makers to better promote and design an effective gender lens into land tenure reforms and natural resource management policies. This book will be of great interest to researchers engaging with land and natural resource management issues from a wide variety of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, development studies, and political science, as well as policy makers, practitioners, and activists concerned with environment, development, and social equity. Caroline S. Archambault is an anthropologist and Senior Researcher in the International Development Studies Group at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Annelies Zoomers is a human geographer and Professor of International Development Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Introduction Part 1: From Communal to Private: Family and Land Alienation? 1. "One doesn't sell to one's parents" Gendered experiences of shifting tenure regimes in the agricultural plan of the Sais in Morocco 2. Aging Ejidos in the Wake of Neo-Liberal Reform: Livelihood predicaments of Mexican Ejidatarias 3. Pastoral Land Prvaitization and Women's Well-Being among the Maasai of Southern Kenya 4. Ensuring that Poor Rural Women Benefit from Forestland Reforms in China: Fieldwork findings and policy recommendations Part 2: From Customary to Customary: Codifying Patriarchy? 5. Cameroon's Community Forests Program and Women's Income Generation from Non-Timber Forest Products: Negative impacts and potential solutions 6. Indigenous Land Struggles in