Record Item Language: English

Abstract: A broad definition of law manifests itself in various ways: it legitimates certain visions of social order, it determines relations between individuals and groups, and it manipulates cultural understandings and discourses over various concepts of rights – and duties. In India, the Hindu Succession Rights Act (HSA) of 1956 allows the wife and daughters, along with the sons of the deceased senior male, to claim an equal share in familial property. By giving inheritance rights to daughters and widows, not only to sons, this Act proposes a radically different organization of the ideal household, commonly referred to as the […]

“Women’s organisations and groups have suggested that the amendment to the Marriage Law Amendment Bill 2012 should be redrafted to make it mandatory for the court to order that both immovable and movable property acquired during the subsistence of marriage be divided equally between the wife and husband. It has also been suggested that the court should take into account any disadvantage suffered by the woman or the children with her and give her a further share of the property.”

“This paper critically examines the claim that women in Kerala have substantial property rights arising out of agrarian and social reform and the practice of matriliny. It argues that land reform strengthened the patriarchal conjugal framework of property relations in the state, compromising women’s independent right to property. While agriculture is no longer considered a viable occupation in the state, greater male occupational mobility has shifted the balance of responsibility for farming and family property increasingly to women. However, this work is being under-reported, is not necessarily ‘visible’ and comes at the cost of paid employment. For some, social mobility […]

“In south Asia, since the 1970s, previously marginalised sections of the rural poor started to organise themselves in movements. In recent years, most of these struggles have been directed against the impact of the liberalising state on the rural poor. For the vast majority, there has been an erosion of livelihood avenues, food insecurity, a loss of assets – owing largely to the loss of their traditional access and control of natural resources. Food security is threatened by loss of biodiversity and loss of knowledge. Women who suffer the most from these trends have in all movements related to these […]

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores the gender dimensions of population control and land tenure policies in a rural village in Northeast China. Gender bias was explicit in the implementation of both policies in the village between 1980 and the mid-1990s. Since that time, explicit gender bias has been reduced and both policies have stressed market incentives more, reflecting China’s modernization goals and accession to the WTO. Yet the policies are not gender neutral in their implementation, effects, and interactions. Women remain the target of the eased population policy, and they are more likely to become ‘‘landless’’ at marriage. […]

Field-work in north, south and west China villages reveals that prior to the establishment of the People’s Republic family organization at all three sites was characterized by the same customary arrangements concerning ownership of property, economic ties among family members, family management and family division. During the collective era and the present period of family fanning changes in these aspects of family life have been along similar lines. I was in a Hebei village for four months during 1986–87, and in 1990 carried out three-month periods of field-work in villages in Shanghai county and on the Chengdu Plain in Sichuan

China’s new Classification-Based Forest Management (CFM) is a two-class system, including Commodity Forest (CoF) and Ecological Welfare Forest (EWF) lands, so named according to differences in their distinct functions and services. The purposes of CFM are to improve forestry economic systems, strengthen resource management in a market economy, ease the conflicts between wood demands and public welfare, and meet the diversified needs for forest services in China. The formative process of China’s CFM has involved a series of trials and revisions. China’s central government accelerated the reform of CFM in the year 2000 and completed the final version in 2003. […]

ABSTRACT: The goals of this article are to help build a clear picture of the role of women in China’s agriculture, to assess whether or not agricultural feminization has been occurring, and if so, to measure its impact on labour use, productivity and welfare. The article uses two high quality data sets to explore who is working on China’s farms and the effects of the labour allocation decisions of rural households on labour use, productivity and welfare. It makes three main contributions. First, we establish a conceptual framework within which to define the different dimensions of agricultural feminization and its […]

Women are an important mainstay of agricultural production in China, though their access to land is characterized by even greater ambiguity than that of their male counterparts. As part of its path toward liberalization, China undertook agricultural land management policy reforms that were aimed at increasing the security of land tenure rights, but these reforms have paradoxically exacerbated the uncertainty surrounding women’s claims to land. Utilizing sample survey data collected from 412 rural households in Shaanxi and Hunan provinces in 2002, this paper documents and analyzes gender differences in land allocations. The findings of this study shed light on the […]