Women's Land Rights and the Trap of Neo-Conservatism: A Response to Jackson

In response to Cecile Jackson's article, I argue here that Jackson has seriously misrepresented my work, often attributing to me the opposite of what I have said, and turned nuanced and balanced formulations into one-sided extremes. I seek to correct the important misrepresentations, as well as outline my substantive differences with Jackson. In particular, her argument that women should not claim family land for risk of destabilizing family relations could, by extension, have deeply conservative implications for all forms of women's struggles to enhance their freedoms and capabilities. In many South Asian communities, conflict is equally inherent in women choosing their own marriage partners or professions, or seeking gender-equal education, or wanting freedom of reproductive choice or free public interaction. The fear of family conflict could tie women down on numerous such counts as well. Jackson also overextends the resistance to women's claims in family land by treating South Asia as a uniform entity. The analysis in my book on this subject shows a substantial regional variability in kinship structures and social norms, which would make for much less resistance in southern South Asia than in the north, providing promising initial avenues for extending women's land claims. Also, unlike Jackson, I do not locate the process of women acquiring land rights in each woman's isolated struggle within the family, but in a collective struggle that seeks to build support across multiple tiers of society.     

2023年土地科学研究重点进展评述及2024年展望——土地经济分报告

研究目的：梳理并比较2023年国内外土地经济领域的研究进展和研究重点,展望未来研究方向。研究方法：文献分析法。研究结果：2023年,国内研究集中于政策对地价的影响、城市土地供给结构与策略的时空动态、土地财政与土地金融、农村集体经营性建设用地入市改革进展、农地流转的影响因素和结果、三权分置改革、宅基地盘活等问题;国外研究侧重土地保护措施和环境保护政策对地价的影响、土地市场的福利效应、土地产权的性别不平等、征地制度的公平性等。研究结论：2023年土地经济研究领域实现了深度和广度的拓展,下一步应着重通过理论研究的创新实现政策的体系化阐释,通过实证研究的深化促进政策的系统性设计,更好地服务新时期的土地制度改革。2024年将重点关注土地经济学科建设和基础理论研究、土地要素市场化配置、城乡融合发展的土地制度创新、自然资源产权制度改革与权益实现路径、全民所有自然资源资产所有权委托代理制度试点等方向。     

Land Registration and Gender Equality in Ethiopia: How State–Society Relations Influence the Enforcement of Institutional Change

In recent years, the Ethiopian government has introduced reforms to promote gender equality in land rights, including legislative changes and a land registration programme that requires the names of both husbands and wives on certificates. This paper examines implementation of these reforms through a case‐based approach that links national policy processes to analysis of two village‐level case studies, based on fieldwork conducted in 2009–10. In both cases, government initiatives do appear to have enhanced women's land rights to a certain degree. However, the causal process involved is considerably more complex than the direct link between titling and women's land rights that is assumed in much of the existing literature. The cases suggest that government initiatives are contingent upon state–society relations, and that change to informal institutions and power relations within society can constitute an important complement to land registration.     

Policy Discourses on Women's Land Rights in Sub–Saharan Africa: The Implications of the Re–turn to the Customary

This article examines some contemporary policy discourses on land tenure reform in sub–Saharan Africa and their implications for women's interests in land. It demonstrates an emerging consensus among a range of influential policy institutions, lawyers and academics about the potential of so–called customary systems of land tenure to meet the needs of all land users and claimants. This consensus, which has arisen out of critiques of past attempts at land titling and registration, particularly in Kenya, is rooted in modernizing discourses and/or evolutionary theories of land tenure and embraces particular and contested understandings of customary law and legal pluralism. It has also fed into a wide–ranging critique of the failures of the post–colonial state in Africa, which has been important in the current retreat of the state under structural adjustment programmes. African women lawyers, a minority dissenting voice, are much more equivocal about trusting the customary, preferring instead to look to the State for laws to protect women's interests. We agree that there are considerable problems with so–called customary systems of land tenure and administration for achieving gender justice with respect to women's land claims. Insufficient attention is being paid to power relations in the countryside and their implications for social groups, such as women, who are not well positioned and represented in local level power structures. But considerable changes to political and legal practices and cultures will be needed before African states can begin to deliver gender justice with respect to land.     

Making community forest management work in northern Vietnam by pioneering participatory action

Transfer of land-use rights from the state to individual households and groups of households to encourage community forest management (CFM) and use of forest resources for livelihood improvement, has been in place in Vietnam since the 1990s. However, to date there has been no evidence of allocation to groups of households as community entities with joint ownership. This paper examines the success of processes tested in four villages in mountainous northern Vietnam to officially secure joint ownership of and exclusive rights to community forest land. After four years, implementation of CFM led to enhanced equality and distribution of benefits, and better protection of forest resources. Household income remained largely unchanged, in part because of loss of income from activities which were now illegal, but also because it was too early for benefits to flow from new forestry initiatives. Active participation of and between village communities in land-use planning and allocation, and a willingness to compromise, particularly on the position of land boundaries, were essential elements to ensuring equity in the distribution of benefits. Lack of enabling processes and experience in the implementation of government policies mean that further support for village communities is needed to fully realize the benefits from joint management of the allocated community forest.     

Gender Levees: Rethinking Women's Land Rights in Northeastern Honduras

In the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch, one woman's impassioned speech linking women's exclusion from land rights with the failings of Honduras' state-led agrarian reform and counter-reform gathered gale force, simultaneously weakening particular levees of gender-bias while constructing others. Post-Hurricane Mitch organizational practices and reconstruction policies in Northeastern Honduras afforded women access to joint property titles and participation. Yet the practices and processes through which women gained new rights reproduced certain exclusionary gender structures and created new barriers to women's participation. These contradictory consequences speak to recent feminist assessments of women's land rights under neo-liberal land titling programmes and a resurgence of policies addressing agrarian reform, and reveal the broader stakes of struggles for women's land rights. In so doing, they underline the importance of attending to spatial connections and historical articulations between the present and the past, and thus the past and the future.     

Methods and tools for integrated assessment of land use policies on sustainable development in developing countries

For stimulating sustainable development in developing countries, land use patterns and land use changes are considered critical, and therefore effective and efficient land use policies are needed. In this paper we present a methodological framework that has been developed in a joint European and developing countries project (LUPIS – Land Use Policies and Sustainable Development in Developing Countries), to assess the impact of land use policies on sustainable development in developing countries. An illustrative application is presented for a case study in China, where water pollution due to agriculture in Taihu Basin is a major problem.     

农村土地“三权分置”的新制度经济学分析

[目的]从新制度经济学视角梳理农村土地"三权分置"的制度变迁过程,并对"三权"各自的权能进行分析,针对现存集体所有权主体缺失、土地承包权权能混乱、土地经营权性质不清等问题解释其原因并提出对策建议。[方法]运用文献综述法、对比法对农村土地试行"三权分置"后集体所有权、农户承包权、土地经营权各自权能进行划分和界定,理顺三者关系。[结果](1)"三权分置"是农村土地产权权能的进一步分解与细化,集体所有权被赋予更完整的土地所有权能;(2)"三权分置"过程中承包地流转路径得到进一步强化,打破土地承包经营权的"成员权"限制;(3)土地经营权的市场性功能与农户承包权的福利性功能同时增强,进一步减少土地对农民的束缚。[结论]"三权分置"是解决农地无人耕种、推动农村土地适度规模经营的重要途径,合理界定"三权"的权能、理顺"三权"的经济学关系、破解法律制度障碍是"三权分置"的改革重点和方向。     

女性土地权益保障的私法命题

研究目的:真正地实现女性土地权益保障的法治命题。研究方法:用法律社会学的研究方法对女性土地权益易流失进行分析。研究结果:中国集体土地资源的身份化配置、家庭财产的性别化配置和农地流转的再分配配置必然造成女性的土地权益极易被剥夺。研究结论:中国现行的土地立法重行政管理而欠缺民法赋权色彩,为集体和家庭剥夺女性土地权益提供了制度保障,因而需要对其进行私法化改造。     

Examining gender inequalities in land rights indicators in Asia

A broad consensus has emerged among both policymakers and researchers that strengthening women's property rights is crucial for reducing poverty and achieving equitable growth. Despite the important role of land in rural livelihoods and as a form of wealth in many Asian countries, surprisingly few nationally representative data exist on women's property rights in Asia.This paucity hinders the formulation and implementation of appropriate policies to reduce gender gaps in land rights. This article reviews the existing micro‐level, large sample data on men's and women's control of land, identifies what can and cannot be measured by these data, and uses these measures to assess the gaps in the land rights of women and men. Utilizing nationally representative individual‐ and plot‐level data from Bangladesh, Tajikistan, Vietnam, and Timor‐Leste, we calculate five indicators: incidence of landownership, distribution of landownership, distribution of plots owned, mean plot size, and distribution of land area, all by sex of owner. The results show large gender gaps in landownership across countries. However, the limited information on joint and individual ownership are among the most critical data gaps and thus are an important area for future data collection and analysis.     

弱保障而强影响：农村土地权益与女性农业转移人口迁移

研究目的:在农村土地权益对农业转移人口迁移的影响作用突显而人口迁移又反过来影响其在农村土地权益处置的现实背景下,研究中国农业转移人口土地权益的性别差异以及迁移行为对土地权益处置影响的性别差异,为制度政策的制定与完善提供依据。研究方法:利用中国流动人口动态监测调查(CMDS)2017年339个城市或地区数据分析中国农业转移人口土地权益的性别差异,构建Logit模型从微观个体的视角分析农业转移人口的迁移对其农村土地权益处置的影响及性别差异。研究结果:(1)女性农业转移人口的迁移对承包地是否自行耕种的影响比男性更大,主要是在婚姻中的女性迁移影响显著强于男性;(2)女性农业转移人口的迁移对承包地是否转租的影响比男性略强,东部和中部地区农业转移人口迁移时间的影响显著而西部和东北地区的影响则不显著。研究结论:与男性相比,女性的农村土地权益保障较弱,但是女性的非农迁移对其家庭农村土地权益流转的影响较强。     

Redefining property rights over collective land in the urban redevelopment of Shenzhen,China

Urban development in China is based on two types of land ownership, namely, state land owned by states and collective land owned by village collectives. Legally speaking, urban development must be based on state land. In practice, informal development based on collective land has played important roles in the rapid urbanization process over the past decades. Nonetheless, the vague property rights over collective land have led to inferior and suboptimal development outcomes in expansive urban areas. The redevelopment of collective land has become an important means to sustain urban development in an ongoing urbanization process. By adopting theoretical perspectives from New Institutional Economics, this study presents an integrated conceptual framework on the institutional arrangements of land property rights and transaction costs to understand the changes in land policies and their institutional implications for the redevelopment of collective land in Shenzhen, China. The findings reveal that the new policies have redefined the relationship among the government, village collectives, and real estate developers as well as their property rights over collective land. The change of institutional arrangements in land property rights has significantly reduced the transaction costs in the redevelopment process and effectively promoted land redevelopment activities.     

Land use dynamics driven by rural industrialization and land finance in the peri-urban areas of China: “The examples of Jiangyin and Shunde”

As China experienced rapid economic growth, non-agricultural land, particularly industrial land, expanded significantly within its peri-urban areas. This paper takes two typical peri-urban areas: Jiangyin in the Yangtze River Delta and Shunde in the Pearl River Delta, as cases, and applies landscape ecology indices to analyze land use dynamics through overlay of their land use maps from 2001 to 2010. This research reveals that local cadres such as township governments and village collectives utilize land finance as a strategy to contest the reshuffling of central-local power brought about by the 1994 tax-sharing scheme. Meanwhile, under the stringent land quota system, local cadres allocated most quotas to the industrial sector in order to encourage economic growth. However, the fragmented governance regime, including county/city, township to administrative village and natural village, led to land fragmentation, which had adverse impacts on sustainable development. In general, the research on land use of peri-urban areas requires a comprehensive perspective of social, economic and institutional aspects.     

Impact assessment of land use policies: Introduction

This special issue is built around a series of impact assessments of land use policies and sustainable development in developing countries, carried out in the EU-funded project LUPIS (Sixth framework programme, Global Change and Ecosystems, Contract 36955). The project targeted at the development and testing of impact assessment tools of land-use-related policies in seven developing countries: Brazil, India, China, Indonesia, Kenya, Mali and Tunisia. This issue presents the current understanding of ex-ante assessment and includes contributions with comparative work across several countries, and case studies in individual countries, addressing important land-use related concerns.     

2018年土地科学研究重点进展评述及2019年展望 ——土地经济分报告

研究目的：梳理并比较2018年国内外土地经济领域研究进展和研究重点,展望未来研究方向。研究方法：文献法。研究结果：2018年,土地价格、土地市场化、土地产权安排、土地征收和土地改革等是国内外共同的研究焦点。国外研究关注城市土地价格的变化趋势、土地市场不完善的原因、产权稳定性与生产效率的关系、土地改革的成效等,而国内研究重点关注农地流转的意愿和价格、失地农民的福利、产权稳定性与农业投资的关系、土地制度演化变迁过程以及集体土地“三权分置”等问题。研究结论：2018年,土地经济领域研究在土地制度变迁过程、土地流转市场新体系、土地供给、土地细碎化、征地影响因素等方面有所进展。2019年将重点关注实现乡村振兴的土地政策、宅基地“三权分置”改革、农村土地制度改革试点跟踪评估、土地经营权流转和融资担保制度等。     

Who Owns the Land? Gender and Land‐Titling Programmes in Latin America

The main focus of state intervention in Latin American agriculture in the 1990s was on land-titling programs, designed to promote security of tenure and enliven land markets. A review of seven of these projects suggests that they were often designed without sufficient attention to civil codes and marital regimes that protect women's property rights. They often ignored that a household's endowment of land may consist of three forms of property: the wife's, the husband's and jointly owned property. By assuming that the family farm is owned by the male household head, these projects trampled upon women's ownership rights. Nonetheless, the share of female beneficiaries of land-titling projects has been much higher than the share of women adjudicated land under the agrarian reforms of previous decades. This is partly because the primary way that women acquire land is through inheritance, and inheritance appears to be more gender equitable than other manners of acquiring land. It is also due to the impact of the more gender-equitable agrarian legislation of the current period, itself a product of the impact of women's movements on the state.     

2017年土地科学研究重点进展评述及2018年展望 ——土地经济分报告

研究目的：梳理并比较2017年国内外土地经济领域研究进展和研究重点,展望未来研究方向。研究方法：文献法。研究结果：（1）国内外研究都较为关注土地价格和土地市场化,但侧重点有不同。与国外研究相比,国内研究更加关注规模经营、农户个体特征对其流转意愿的影响和农地金融创新。（2）国内外学者都关注土地产权制度、土地制度设计和变革,但国内学者更关注如何通过制度创新以盘活土地资源。研究结论：土地经济领域未来可能的研究重点有：落实乡村振兴战略的土地政策、农村土地制度改革试点、集体建设用地统筹利用、农地三权分置、农业农村发展用地保障机制,以及改革开放40周年土地市场与土地制度的系统性回顾、分析与展望等问题。     

Key issues of land use in China and implications for policy making

The paper aims to comprehensively analyze key issues of current land use in China. It identifies the major land-use problems when China is undergoing rapid urbanization. Then, the paper interprets and assesses the related land-use policies: requisition-compensation balance of arable land, increasing vs. decreasing balance of urban-rural built land, reserved land system within land requisition, rural land consolidation and economical and intensive land use. The paper finds that current policies are targeting specific problems while being implemented in parallel. There is lacking a framework that incorporates all the policies. The paper finally indicates the current land-use challenges and proposes strategic land-use policy system to guide sustainable land use in the future.     

村民自治的村委会权力配置的制度缺位与改革考量

本文提出和分析村委会权力内部关系和外部关系理不顺的问题表现;主要是：村民自治组织的决策权、执行权和监督权的关系理不顺。村民自治组织的村委会与村民的关系理不顺,村委会权力与外部权力关系理不顺;分析了这些问题产生的原因及其形成机制;阐述如何完善村民自治的组织体制的权力结构改革与重组等改革措施。