Abstract
Land is a fundamental asset for people’s livelihood, especially for those living in rural areas: it is both a source of livelihood and identity.
However, the way people can benefit from access to and control over land varies according to the political, institutional, legal and social context which they are embedded in. Moreover, land rights are increasingly subject to market and competition rules. In the last decades, climate change, spread of urbanization, population growth and commercialization of land have been posing increasing threats to people’s land rights.
In this scenario, women represent a particularly vulnerable category, chiefly where the legal frameworks are not adequate or suffer from the supremacy of customary rights as well as from the lack of education and awareness.
According to estimates, women constitute about 43 percent of the agricultural workforce in the developing world, and this percentage is likely to increase due to the men’s migration towards urban areas. However, looking at the statistics on land possession, male landholders are much more numerous than their female counterparts, across all regions. Evidence also shows that in most of the cases female holders have smaller plots, of lower quality (SOFA Team and C. Doss, 2011).
This reality does not only demonstrate that gender inequality is still a critical issue in land rights, but it is also strongly related to development.
The aim of the present paper is first to illustrate this relationship and second to analyse how the vicious cycle existing between them could be inverted.
In order to do so, the paper goes through the definition of land rights and development, reporting estimates on gender disparities. The second section spells out the link, seen as a mutual one, illustrating both the reciprocal barriers and the potential benefits. Finally, in the last section some policies’ proposals are advanced for inverting the cycle into a virtuous one.
DEFINING WOMEN’S LAND RIGHTS
Women’s land rights can be defined as the “ability of women to own, use, access, control, transfer, inherit and otherwise take decisions about land and related resources” (UN Women, 2013, p. 1). However, the sole existence of these rights is not enough for them to be effective. In many cases, a gap exists between formal rights and reality, in the sense that there may be very well defined and detailed laws or regulations guaranteeing women’s land rights but no social acceptance. Therefore, for rights to be substantial they must be recognized by society and be enforceable in front of public authorities. In parallel, the beneficiaries must be aware of their entitlements.
Rekha Mehra adds another requisite for women’s land rights to be secure: she points out that women must have independent rights to land. Indeed, “independent title would permit women much greater autonomy and enhance their choices to make their own decisions about land use priorities, to control output, to escape marital conflict, and to have secure access to a means of earning a living in case of marital break-up or of a spouse’s death” (Mehra, 1995, p. 5).
Finally, land laws and regulations must not be imposed on women by external authorities or entities; on the contrary, women themselves should fully participate in the policy-making, programme development and evaluation processes, directly or through civil society organizations representing their voices.
Concerning the monitoring and enforcement of women’s rights to land, difficulties may emerge because there is “no consistent national or global data on the full scope of women’s land rights or access to land” ( UN Working group, 2017, p. 1). Indeed, considering that nationally data on land ownership are generally collected on a household level, there are no, or few, disaggregated data by gender, which makes it difficult to have a precise image of women’s independent ownership of and control over land.
However, some estimates are available: according to the UN Working Group on the issue of discrimination against women in law and in practice, “women make up on average less than 20 percent of the world’s landholders, but make up an estimated 43 percent of the agricultural labour force. Globally, more than 400 million women work in agriculture. In sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, 60 to 70 percent of employed women work in agriculture” (UN Working group, 2017, p. 1). However, as reported by SIDA, female-headed households normally manage farms that “are between half to 2/3 the size of farms run by male-headed households” and “agriculture extension services are accessible to only 5% of women that make up the agriculture workforce in developing countries” (SIDA, 2015, p. 1).
Landesa (2016), The law of the Land: Women’s rights to land. Available at https://www.landesa.org/resources/property-not-poverty/.
DEFINING DEVELOPMENT
Data reported give an account of gender disparities in land rights: despite the differences between regions and countries, gender-specific constraints generally limit women’s productivity and contribution to economic growth and well-being of their families, communities and countries, as well as their self-empowerment. Thus, “the issue of women’s land rights is not only important today, it is likely to become increasingly so over time” (Agarwal, 2003, p. 191). This means that women’s land rights are strictly related to development. But what do we mean by development?
For long, human development has been mostly associated with economic development only, i.e economic growth and GDP per capita. However, this narrow interpretation has been criticized in favour of a more comprehensive one, which considers development as human well-being.
Amartya Sen has been one of the main supporters of this second definition of development: he defined development as the expansion of human capabilities. People have capabilities if they are free to do things they value and to choose their way of living. Capabilities thus imply the freedom of a person of choosing from different functionings, between different doings and beings. Thus, Sen proposes that developing means expanding this individual freedom through the removal of main barriers such as inequality, discrimination, violence, poor services and infrastructures, lack of access to these and to basic livelihoods, and so on. In this view, economic growth is just a mean to guarantee freedom and thus capabilities. Income needs to be converted into functionings: the individual’s ability to do so vary.
The following section goes more into details in explaining the connection between women’s land rights and development. Taking into consideration both dimensions of development, a three-dimensional relation emerges.
This paper’s argument is that there exists a vicious cycle where each dimension hinders the other. The reason is that any attempt to address the issue usually starts from development intended almost exclusively as market expansion, modernization and economic welfare, with few or none consideration for substantial empowerment. Thus, the key would be shifting the starting point, which means starting from women’s empowerment to guarantee both land rights and development as economic welfare and modernization.
CIRCUMSCRIBED WOMEN’S LAND RIGHTS: LACK OF EMPOWERMENT
A huge barrier for women’s enjoyment of equal land rights arises from lack of empowerment. Being empowered means having capabilities and being able to autonomously make decisions and take actions. According to Sabine Pallas, empowerment must be understood from different points of view, namely social, economic, political and legal: lack of empowerment under all these manifestations creates deep gender disparities in land rights (Pallas, 2010, p. 272).
Legal empowerment can be seen as the starting point for closing the gender gap, since legal pluralism and predominance of customary rights pose strong challenges to the substantial realization of gender equality. Indeed, while most of the national constitutions all over the world recognize gender equality, civil codes dealing with inheritance, family and housing rights do not always follow the same line. In as much as land rights are related to many other domains such as marriage, family, inheritance and housing, “in general, there is no single legal field which covers all aspects of women’s security of tenure” (UN HABITAT, 2007, p. 14). This generates a situation of legal pluralism that undermines clarity and effectiveness. “For example, the Indian Constitution recognises the equal rights of women and men, but it also recognises the personal laws (in inheritance and marriage, divorce, separation) of its different ethnic and religious groups” (UN-HABITAT, 2007, p. 13). This often leads to gender discrimination.
Moreover, even when specific laws or regulations address and recognize women’s rights to land, customary laws and culture may prevent these from being fully implemented. For instance, “in Samoa, customs prevent the implementation of legislation which provides the husband the option of naming a wife as a joint owner. In Pakistan, women can formally own land but generally custom may limit their rights to use or dispose of it” (UN HABITAT, 2007 p.16).
Therefore, women’s land rights are not just a matter of legal empowerment. When women do not enjoy the necessary social status, income and political power to claim and defend their rights, even proper and potentially effective laws are not translated into secure land rights.
All over the world, societies are still governed by patriarchy: male domination affects both the private and public sphere of family and communities’ lives, influencing land possession and governance systems too. Especially in developing countries, women receive rights to land mostly through a male relative, either their fathers, husbands or brothers. Consequently, their rights strictly depend on their status as daughters, sisters, or wives: if this changes, their rights change too, even if women would probably need them the most, being orphans, widows or divorced.
The dependent nature of their rights to land means that women lack the power to autonomously decide how to use the land: “any rights granted to women are limited to specific uses (and perhaps times)” (Mehra, 1995, p.7 ). For instance, women usually lack the capability of deciding to produce food to be sold in the market. On the contrary, the food coming from their work is mainly destined to households’ consumption.
By virtue of that, lack of social empowerment is associated with lack of economic empowerment. Since they are dependent on their male relative and they play a minor or no role in the agricultural market, women lack the means to get independent access to secure livelihoods. Besides, they do not have the economic resources to buy land on their own, or to get access to complementary assets such as credit and technology.
This scenario is further exacerbated by lack of political empowerment. Especially in developing countries, public meetings, politics and law are still regarded as a male-dominated area so that women are less likely to participate to the public sphere. The workload pending on them constitutes an additional obstacle.
Hence, women are deprived of a direct voice in policy-making processes regarding land tenure too, while their involvement would be crucial to render such policies effective in addressing the gender gap. In parallel, rural women usually lack the necessary awareness and legal literacy to claim their rights, even when these are formally recognized.
CIRCUMSCRIBED WOMEN’S LAND RIGHTS: MARKET EXPANSION AND MODERNIZATION
Empirical evidence demonstrates that women’s legal rights are strongly correlated to economic development, in areas stemming from property and land rights to violence and abortion. “Doepke and Tertilt (2009) show a robust negative correlation of 0.4 or higher across countries between the lack of rights and GDP per capita” (Duflo, 2012, p. 1059). When a country’s economy grows, more resources are available so to reduce the constraints faced especially by the poorest people. Since rural women are often those responsible for their household’s livelihood, economic development may decrease their vulnerability.
However, when considering women’s land rights and empowerment, the excessive search for development as market expansion and modernization actually poses additional barriers. Development has we have intended it until recently is significantly contributing to broadening pressures on land, through climate change, increasing urbanization and commodification of agricultural land.
Climate change has a two-fold impact on agriculture: desertification is reducing the availability of agricultural land while frequency of natural disasters is destroying the harvests. Urbanization too is negatively affecting agricultural land’s availability. Finally, land concentration and land privatization provoke commercial pressure on land: “it is not only farm land that is subject to these commercial pressures (…) but also common property resources (such as grazing lands, forests, wetlands, and foreshores), urban lands, and protected ecologically-sensitive areas” (Daley, 2011, p. 3).
Indeed, in modern times there has been a growth in contract-farming arrangements where large-scale firms acquire foreign lands, mostly in developing countries, to ensure a steady supply for the market. Potentially, this may help small-scale farmers and women, through easier access to technologies and lower costs for meeting the more and more qualified demand of consumers in national and international markets. However, evidence demonstrates that lacking control over land and other means necessary to guarantee a certain stable amount of production, female farmers are broadly excluded from modern-contract farming deals. “For example, women comprise fewer than 10 percent of the farmers involved in smallholder contract-farming schemes in the Kenyan fresh fruit and vegetable export sector (Dolan, 2001), and only 1 of a sample of 59 farmers contracted in Senegal to produce French beans for the export sector was a woman (Maertens and Swinnen, 2009)” (FAO, 2011, p. 13).
Hence, it is evident that the search for economic development, modernization, and markets’ expansion is neglecting the social aspects of land and women’s land rights, so to deepen the gender gap.
II.3 BARRIERS TO WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT AND ECONOMIC GROWTH: LACK OF LAND RIGHTS
If an excessive concern with economic growth, modernization and market expansion without considering substantial women’s empowerment worsen their enjoyment of land rights, at the same time the disparities in land rights hinder development intended as both empowerment and economic growth. This ends up perpetuating the vicious cycle.
Insecure property rights for women constitute a disincentive for them to invest in their lands. Fearing that they could be deprived of their land at any time, women are not encouraged to look for potential streams of return in the future, which may end up in the hands of a foreign company, the government or a male relative. Moreover, Goldstein and Udry (2008) have shown that farmers with more secure land rights have a higher tendency to fallow their land, and do it for longer; this allows them to have more productive lands. Since women have weak land rights, they fallow less often: their land will is less productive (FAO, 2011, p. 41).
Thus, strengthening women’s rights to land would imply significant gains for the household and the community, as well as for the society in the long-term. If rural women had access to the same rights and resources as men, agricultural output in developing countries would increase between 2.5 and 4 percent (FAO, 2011, p. vi). This would give a significant contribution to the fight against poverty and food insecurity and to the achievement of broader economic and social goals.
Women who do have secure rights to land also enjoy an enhanced social and economic status and more decision-making power, thus more capabilities: for instance, women may derive the necessary power to decide to reserve part of the agricultural production for commercial purposes so to have an independent earning. Women may also have the possibility to actively participate into decisions taken at the household, community or local level, and to challenge external claims on their lands.
Jyoti Rao indeed suggests that looking at land rights through the lens of Sen’s (1979) capability approach makes it possible to identify fundamental nine functioning associated with land that are generalizable at global level. Amongst these, he identifies Secure means to basic ends, Social equity and empowerment, Family well-being and Political empowerment (RAO, 2018, p.1).
However, there is a further benefit of securing women’s land rights, namely an improved environmental management. Weakness in women’s land rights is one of the causes for low land quality and soil erosion, because of no investment in soil-enriching inputs, conservation techniques or trees’ plantation that can enrich the soil. “In an example from Tucurrique, Costa Rica, Bruce (1989) established that the level of investment, and hence the quality of land (an indicator of its sustainability), varied with the level of farmer security” (Mehra, 1995, p.15).
FROM VICIOUS TO VIRTUOUS: INVERTING THE CYCLE
By virtue of the previous analysis, it is possible to say that land rights, economic development (including market expansion and modernization), and women’s empowerment are three complementary and mutually destructive/reinforcing triangle’s vertex.
This three-dimensional approach is in line with the Engendering Development (2001) report’s approach, where the World Bank called for policies to address gender disparities in rights, resources, and voice (World Bank, 2001).
For long, economic development, modernization and market expansion have been put at the forefront: policy makers and projects developers have been giving priority to economies’ boosting and new technologies’ introduction in order to trigger positive consequences.
However, data and evidences show that the social dimension has not actually benefited from this approach: women still lack empowerment and independent land rights. Also, poverty and food security are far from being completely beaten.
III.1 WHICH STRATEGY TO INVERT THE CYCLE?
This paper’s argument is that policies, projects and programmes should instead start from empowerment and work on it from different perspectives.
Firstly, laws have to be revised to make sure that discriminatory provisions are eliminated and unclear ones are better specified. Besides this, the crucial issue is to make sure that family, housing, inheritance and marriage law are harmonised and gender-responsive. For instance, specific laws should be adopted that explicitly recognize women as having the same rights to land’s inheritance as their brothers, and as being (eligible) beneficiaries for land reforms, independently from their marital status.
Marital property law should also be revised to guarantee joint titling and administration of major assets, even in the case of consensual or customary unions (and polygamy too). This would avoid land to be registered exclusively under the men’s name, guaranteeing the woman a voice in case of sale, mortgage, lease, eventual expropriation or in case of divorce and widowhood.
However, as stated above, legal empowerment alone is not effective. “For example, in West Bengal, India, even when a wife’s name is included in land reform documentation, she often is not informed of the fact, or of her property right to the land, or of her inclusion as a joint owner, due to cultural patriarchal structures and attitudes” (UN HABITAT, 2007, p. 23). Therefore, awareness raising and legal support must be included in policy-making: public institutions and government agencies should foresee a partnership with civil society organizations engaged in gender and land issues. The participative approach would see organizations positively contributing to policy-making processes due to their direct experience with the eventual beneficiaries, and being entitled with evaluation and monitoring tasks. Moreover, they can stand as spokesperson for the women they represent. For instance, civil society organizations strongly contributed to the draft of the 1997 Land Law in Mozambique, while “the Zambia Land Alliance is a coalition of civil society organizations that has been actively involved in the policy process leading up to the adoption of land policy in that country” (UN HABITAT, 2007, p. 34).
An effective policy should also provide for the implementation of a gender-disaggregated data collection system: instead of collecting data on land ownership and use at the household level, a specification should be made on who is the actual legal owner and user of the land (either the wife, the husband or both). Such measure would help in gauging the efficacy of gender-responsive policies and in understanding which issues it is important to work on.
But policies that facilitate women’s access to credit are important too. On the one hand, women often find it difficult to obtain credit from banks because land’s ownership is required. On the other hand, credit helps women to buy, inter alia, inputs to better work the land. Consequently, policies may substitute land with other assets such as group guarantees: this may be useful to guarantee women’s access to lending.
However, a State does not only have to respect and fulfil land rights, but it also has to protect them from interference from third parties. This is particularly important in case of foreign companies’ land purchase. For instance, biofuels’ production is depriving more and more people of many resources, or rendering the access to them more difficult. Yet, a UN report (UN Energy, 2007) showed that there exists a big potential for bioenergy to positively impact on poverty’s reduction and women farmers’ condition. In order for this potential to be realized, it is important that resulting biofuels are not all exported or priced too high and that women are empowered with access to them (Daley, 2011, p. 17). Thus, governments may implement policies establishing that investing companies have to provide the women of the households or communities in question with a percentage of biofuels’ production. This would offer health benefits as well as time saving. Another effective measure would be that the same women are involved in biofuels’ sale, directly in the company or through cooperatives’ creation, generating an important source of economic empowerment.
CONCLUSION
The concern for women’s land rights is expressed also by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The UN plan of action indeed dedicates a specific indicator, number 5.a.2, to women’s equal rights to land ownership: the indicator aims at measuring the “proportion of countries where the legal framework (including customary law) guarantees women’s equal rights to land ownership and/or control” (UN 2030Agenda, 2015).
As this paper has tried to demonstrate, women’s secure land rights are crucial to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. They depend and at the same time have a positive impact on economic growth, fight against poverty and hunger, and women’s empowerment. Environmental management and protection also play a key role.
For this reason, strengthening women land rights represents a fundamental challenge: it would have both a synchronic and diachronic function. Secure women land rights can improve the economic, social and environmental sustainability of both present and future generations.
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