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

Transnational land deals pose vexing normative (ethical) questions, not least concerning gendered participation and outcomes. This article explores utilitarian and human rights approaches to gender equality in selected policy initiatives on the land deals. While global policy literature manifests growing attention to women in agriculture, the review found the analysis of gender in early policy initiatives to be absent or weak. Utilitarian arguments were used to justify deals but rarely presented women's participation as a means of social progress or so-called smart economics. Human rights documents were more likely to be critical of the deals and to mention gender, though with little elaboration. While to some extent amended by the emphasis on gender equality in the 2012 Voluntary Guidelines on tenure governance, failures to mobilize the feminist potential in utilitarian and human rights approaches call for more proactive gender analysis and advocacy when addressing transnational land deals as gendered power struggles.     

“Our Lands are Our Lives”: Gendered Experiences of Resistance to Land Grabbing in Rural Cambodia

ABSTRACT

Cambodia is known as a hotspot for land grabbing in Southeast Asia. Land dispossession due to elite capture, natural resources exploitation, and agribusiness development has catalyzed international attention following outbreaks of violence, mass protests, and retaliations. Agrarian economies, as well as social and gender relations and thus power dynamics at different levels, are being transformed and reshaped, facilitated by policies that promote capital penetration in rural areas and individualization of land access. Focusing on cases of rural dispossession and political resistance in Ratanakiri and Kampong Speu provinces, and drawing on reports, government documents, focus group discussions, and interviews, this study analyzes the gendered implications of land grabbing in contemporary Cambodia and argues that gender shapes and informs women’s responses and politics, as well as the spaces in which these are played out.     

Coercive Harmony in Land Acquisition: The Gendered Impact of Corporate “Responsibility” in the Brazilian Amazon

In rural development, women's access to land is recognized as a condition for reaching gender equality. This contribution discusses the tension between this formal recognition and concrete realities in rural development for traditional Amazonian communities by examining large-scale land acquisitions in Brazil, a land-abundant developing country, in the wake of the 2007–08 global food price crises. This study applies anthropological and legal perspectives to analyze problems related to gender inequality caused by large-scale land acquisitions. It argues that inequalities cannot be resolved by simply changing regulations related to traditional communities’ and women's rights and that gender relations and land tenure issues reflect interconnected social arrangements based on historical specificities of traditional communities. Case studies show that land acquisitions by outsiders disrupt these arrangements, despite stated commitments to social and environmental responsibility. Such “coercive harmony” is only unmasked when communities are conscious of their rights, enabling effective use of the legal apparatus.     

Women and Land Deals in Africa and Asia: Weighing the Implications and Changing the Game

Large-scale land deals have attracted much attention from media and policymakers, and several international initiatives are attempting to regulate and address the impacts of such deals. Little attention has been paid to the gendered implications of such deals in the literature, and most regulatory initiatives do not address gender adequately. To fill this gap, this contribution identifies implications of land deals for women and recommends measures to mitigate negative impacts. It reviews evidence from four case studies commissioned for the International Land Coalition (ILC) Global Study of Commercial Pressures on Land conducted in 2010. The evidence is analyzed within a framework that posits women's vulnerability to land deals as due to four dimensions of underlying discrimination. This study analyzes three of these dimensions in depth, arguing that women are likely to be affected differently by land deals and disproportionately more likely to be negatively affected than men.     

Who Owns the Land? Perspectives from Rural Ugandans and Implications for Large-Scale Land Acquisitions

Rapidly growing demand for agricultural land is putting pressure on property-rights systems, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, where customary tenure systems have provided secure land access. Rapid and large-scale demands from outsiders are challenging patterns of gradual, endogenous change toward formalization. Little attention has focused on the gender dimensions of this transformation. However this contribution, based on a 2008–09 study of land tenure in Uganda, analyzes how different definitions of land ownership – including household reports, existence of ownership documents, and rights over the land – provide very different indications of the gendered patterns of land ownership and rights. While many households report husbands and wives as joint owners of the land, women are less likely to be listed on ownership documents, and have fewer rights. A simplistic focus on “title” to land misses much of the reality regarding land tenure and could have an adverse impact on women's land rights.     

Post-Earthquake Land Appropriations and the Dispossession of Rural Women in Haiti

ABSTRACT

This study examines the trajectory of rural women’s labor in the wake of post-earthquake land appropriations in Haiti. Drawing on ethnographic field research conducted between 2010 and 2013, it explores gendered access to land in Haiti in both historical and contemporary contexts, paying attention to the nature of rural gender relations and how they influence women’s access to land and their roles in petty commerce. The study describes the stratification of rural market women, their lived experience, and how losing land access will affect their traditional roles as market women. Ultimately it argues that without access to land, and a paucity of available wage work, recent dispossession will intensify existing vulnerabilities for rural women and narrow their means of household production by forcing them to depend on informal market activity in their roles as machann (market women).     

Can the Law Secure Women's Rights to Land in Africa? Revisiting Tensions Between Culture and Land Commercialization

This contribution is concerned with the challenges of securing women's rights to land in Africa in the context of contemporary land deals through a discussion of three distinct but interrelated problems in the framing of women's land rights discourses. First, this study discusses the interface between rights and “custom” to highlight the inherent distortions of African customary law. Second, it argues that liberal formulations of the law are limited by a set of assumptions regarding women's position in the political economy. And third, this discussion discursively assesses the debates in the literature regarding the efficacy of law in protecting women's rights to land. The discussion proceeds from a critique of two approaches to promoting gender equity in land tenure systems: the institutional approach, which deals with women's formal land rights; and the political economy approach, which deals with the structural nature of women's traditional relations to land.     

When a Good Business Model is Not Enough: Land Transactions and Gendered Livelihood Prospects in Rural Ghana

Recent large-scale commercial agriculture projects in developing countries have raised concerns about the effects on natural resource-based livelihood activities of local people. A significant weakness in the emerging literature is the lack of a gender perspective on implications for agrarian livelihoods. This article explores the gendered aspects of land transactions on livelihood prospects in the Northern Region of Ghana. Drawing on qualitative research from two commercial agriculture projects, the article examines how pre-existing gender inequalities in agrarian production systems, as well as gender biases in project design, are implicated in post-project livelihood activities. The article concludes that a good business model of a land deal, even one that includes local communities in production and profit sharing, is not sufficient to protect women's livelihood prospects if projects ignore pre-existing gender inequalities and biases, which limit access to opportunities.     

The Global Land Grab Meta-Narrative,Asian Money Laundering and Elite Capture: Reconsidering the Cambodian Context

The dramatic expansion of large-scale economic land concessions and acquisitions in the Global South has generated considerable concern amongst activists, journalists and academics recently. This has led to the increased prevalence of the term ‘global land grabbing’, which I argue represents a particular type of meta-narrative. In this article the global land grab meta-narrative is considered in relation to recent land alienation of Indigenous Peoples in the northeastern Cambodia province of Ratanakiri. While land grabbing is certainly a crucial problem, it is insufficient to explain the circumstances in Ratanakiri or in Cambodia more generally as ‘global land grabbing’. While foreign capital is associated with land grabbing in Cambodia, there are various other factors that also require consideration. Specifically, the role of Asian money laundering and elite capture requires increased attention. This article contributes to better understanding the particular ways that land dispossession plays out in particular places and contexts.     

The impacts of women's land ownership: Evidence from Vietnam

Women's equal access to and control over economic resources such as land are integral to achieve gender equality and sustainable economic development. This study evaluates the impacts of women's land ownership on various women's and household's outcomes in the context of Vietnam. We discuss the beneficial effects of allowing women to own more land on both women and their families. In particular, there is a positive association between women's land ownership and intra-household bargaining power in various aspects. In particular, the relationship is the strongest for women's autonomy in decisions regarding their children. It is also easier for land-holding women to formally access credit and invest in human capital. We further study the favorable effects of women's land ownership on their families in terms of spending and saving behaviors. Finally, women's land ownership also contributes to household social capital. These findings lend support to the passage and implementation of laws intended to grant women equal rights to the ownership and control over land.     

Micro-Geopolitics: Capitalising Security in Laos’s Golden Quadrangle

Enclosure, dispossession and displacement loom large in current debates about the recent boom in transnational farmland deals, and about Chinese agribusiness for export in particular. Often under-examined, however, are the ways that legacies of geopolitical conflict shape the inevitably uneven distribution of enclosure, dispossession and displacement. This paper constructs a case of these ‘micro-geopolitical’ legacies by examining a Chinese rubber planting ‘promotion’ project in northwestern Laos’s emerging ‘Golden Quadrangle’ development region. It argues that longstanding concerns about security inform the ways that local authorities deploy investment projects that are otherwise seen as examples of ‘foreign’ land grabbing. Further, it shows that while the geographical aims of foreign agribusiness mesh with state-mediated resettlement efforts (a darker spin on the narrative of ‘win-win’ cooperation), these activities often precede current land deals rather than result from them. Chinese agribusiness in Laos’s upland interior thus appears less as a driver of displacement than a means for attempting to secure in place a particular (if precarious) configuration of population and security.     

Land Tenure Insecurity and Formalizing Land Rights in Madagascar: A Gender Perspective on the Certification Program

This contribution examines Madagascar's land tenure reform – aimed at reducing land tenure insecurity – from a gender perspective. In particular, it investigates the certification program issuing formal land title deeds (land certificates) to landholders. Drawing on a household survey with gender-disaggregated asset data conducted in the rural municipality Soavinandriana, the analysis suggests that the certification program has strengthened both men's and women's formal claims to individually held land. However, the lack of gender equality principles and, in particular, of mechanisms to ensure that couples’ jointly held land is jointly secured, seems to have reinforced primary ownership of land by male household heads, at the expense of women's land rights. Furthermore, the land tenure reform does not address some of the most important threats to tenure security such as colonial titles and commercial pressure on land, and large parts of the country are still not covered by the certification program.     

试论我国农地发展权定位及农民分享实现

经营性征地给社会经济发展带来许多不稳定因素,其中一个极为重要的原因是由于长期以来强大的行政权力取代了土地发展权的权效。从这一角度出发,文章首先介绍了发展权的含义和特征并总结了我国农地发展权的现状,在此基础上针对农地市地化过程中的土地发展权进行了定位,提出将发展权分享引入征地补偿机制即农民参与发展权权益的分享,紧接着探讨了发展权分享实现问题,并对农民发展权分享进行了量化。旨在通过对发展权的适当安排缓解现行征地体制中的一些矛盾,从而在深层次上促进我国土地产权制度的健全和土地的合理利用。     

坚持农地集体所有的思考

本文在系统梳理中国农村改革历程的基础上,指出改革初期,为了满足农民的温饱诉求,党和政府逐渐认同了农民推出的“大包干”做法;温饱问题解决之后,为了满足农民外出从事非农就业的诉求,党和政府赋予农民自主流转其承包土地经营权的权利;现在,为了满足农民享有土地财产权益的诉求,党和政府应赋予农民土地股份的权利,将农村集体土地产权按份共有的改革目标落到实处。股权是集体经济的基础。改革初期以含义模糊的承包权替代含义清晰的土地股权,是为了达成改革共识;现在以含义清晰的土地股权替代含义模糊的土地承包权,是改革深化和认识与时俱进的结果。     

制度安排、价格机制与农地非农化研究

本文在考察中国农地非农化途径的基础上,分析了土地市场结构及其价格形成机制,认为中国土地市场结构不合理及其价格扭曲是农地过度非农化的原因。形成这种土地市场结构的深层原因则是土地产权不清晰,土地收益分配不合理和土地管理体制不完善。我们运用苏南G市的数据对土地市场发育、土地产权和土地管理体制与农地非农化的关系进行了实证研究,研究结果验证了我们的理论推理。     

土地发展权博弈视角下高铁站区开发权及开发利益分配

世界上作为城市综合体的高铁站区都依托于权责利益明确的土地开发,但我国大多数高铁站综合开发收效甚微。在分析中国高铁站区开发土地发展权的内涵及其权利归属现状的基础上,认为产生上述差异的原因在于高铁站区的土地发展权归属不同。在此基础上,以高铁站区土地为核心,以铁路主体为桥梁,对铁路主体与政府之间的土地发展权归属问题进行了不完全信息下的动态博弈分析,以寻求土地发展权归属的最优策略。结论如下:在地方政府选择让渡、铁路主体选择服从、铁路主体与市场主体形成综合开发联盟并通过铁路主体的最终开发活动实现博弈均衡时,各方获得最大收益。     

Domesticated Dispossessions? Towards a Transnational Feminist Geopolitics of Development

Geopolitics today is increasingly marked by the violent convergence of (in)security, market integration, and dispossession. Yet few studies address the connected, counter-insurgent geopolitics of ostensibly ameliorative, women-focused development interventions in the (post)colonial world. This paper charts a new theorisation of the geopolitics of development by focusing on gendered social movements, intersecting relations of difference, and social reproduction in two seemingly distinct areas: rural Guatemala and urban India. It introduces a transnational feminist geopolitical analytic – based on relational comparison, critical ethnography, and collaborative dialogue – to elucidate both specificity and global interconnection. Specifically, this consists of analysing struggles over dispossession through processes of ‘de(bt)velopment’ in the Ch'orti’ Highlands and ‘redevelopment’ in Mumbai at key historical conjunctures. These struggles illuminate not only (in)securities experienced by marginalised groups but also the transformative potentialities and domesticating limitations of social mobilisation. In conclusion, the paper offers insights into the how of doing more liberatory geopolitical praxis.     

Land Grabs,Power, and Gender in East and Southern Africa: So,What's New?

When land grabs are viewed from a gendered and historical lens, critical questions arise concerning three domains of inquiry about what is arguably “new,” “foreign,” and “large-scale?” They highlight historical continuities from the colonial past elite and male capture and gendered micro-political land grabs unabated over long periods of time, which once aggregated across Sub-Saharan Africa, are large-scale in themselves. This contribution reflects on feminist political-ecological research on gender and land in Kenya, Mozambique, and Madagascar and provides windows into negotiations and contestations in processes of land grabs. It analyzes what is new, while considering relations of power and knowledge that shape different ways land grabs are named and, therefore, the kinds of actions that are subsequently prescribed. Land grabs are occurring in spite of strong laws and policies, illustrating the critical role of power relations in shaping them.     

土地承包经营权抵押的可行性分析

土地承包经营权抵押是农村产权流转改革的必要组成部分,现实中存在着发展的需求与可行性。但目前中国《物权法》、《担保法》、《土地承包法》等相关法律对土地承包经营权抵押有着相当程度的限制,实践中还有农民失地风险、土地用途改变风险、抵押权变现风险和金融风险等多方面潜在因素的影响,导致目前土地承包经营权抵押不能得到大范围推广。但这些潜在风险都可以通过配套法律制度的完善得到防范,建议通过修改法律规定、建立农村土地承包经营权流转服务中心、引进专业中介机构服务、出台金融扶持政策等多种渠道达到促进合法流转、保障农民权益的目标。     

Structural Adjustment Programme, Deforestation and Biodiversity Loss in Ghana

An empirical investigation is undertaken into the impact of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) on forest and biodiversity loss in Ghana between the period 1965–1995. In the first part of the analysis, a four-equation recursive model, consisting of forest loss, cocoa land, maize land and timber production equations, is employed to examine the impact of the SAP on forest loss. The first equation is a function of the last three, and the last three are functions of mainly prices. Piecewise linear and switching regression approaches are used to distinguish between the influence of the post from the pre-adjustment impacts. These results together with a specie-forest area relationship are used to investigate the impact of the SAP on biodiversity loss. The overall results indicate that cocoa land expansion and timber production, but not maize land expansion, are the significant causes of forest loss in Ghana. However, the impact on forest loss in the post-adjustment period was reduced. The rate of biodiversity loss also reduced in the post-adjustment period. Changes in relative output and input prices due to the SAP may have played a significant role in the reduced impact of agricultural and timber related deforestation and biodiversity loss in the post-adjustment period.