Record Item Language: English

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This paper aims to demonstrate that China’s land policy and land law are altered in social interactions between different actors. Such social processes have led to the gendering of rural land tenure practices, but also a highly heterogeneous situation with regard to land tenure. This paper aims to demonstrate that the combined effect of marital relations, kinship, social network and low political representation of women in the community often results in the deprivation of women’s land rights and many women are becoming landless. However, our field research shows that there are also cases where women are able to get access […]

Women who own land may still lack control over it. Despite claims that women enjoy high status in Kerala, economic, social, and cultural factors interact to reinforce gender differences in ownership, control over, and access to critical agricultural resources, including land.

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

Who gets what, why and how, when Chinese villagers’ land is enclosed? Focusing specifically on changes in women’s property rights and drawing on data from Zhejiang province, this article shows that state, village and household institutions interact to produce significant gender disparities in both the compensation paid to expropriated villagers and the registration of ownership of household assets. Yet it would be incorrect to conclude that, dispossessed,women thereby lack agency.Analysis of women’s responses to expropriation suggests that by selectively deploying laws, rules and norms in different settings,women are influencing not only compensation distribution, but also the terms under which the […]

Abstract: The debate over land reform in Africa is embedded in evolutionary models, in which it is assumed landholding systems are evolving into individualized systems of ownership with greater market integration. This process is seen to be occurring even without state protection of private land rights, through titling. Gender as an analytical category is excluded in evolutionary models. Women are accommodated only in their dependent position as the wives of landholders in idealized “households”. This paper argues that gender relations are central to the organization and transformation of landholding systems. Women have faced different forms of tenure insecurity, both as […]

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