Land Tenure Housing Rights And Gender In Zambia

Are women's fragile land rights in Africa being eroded in a period of privatisation and land reforms sponsored by the World Bank? Changing global employment and trade patters and the HIV/AIDS epidemic has affected women in particular. A complexity is that women's and men's interests within households are both joint and separate, yet many land reform programmes are based on the notion of a unitary household in which resources benefit the whole family. Today new land market opportunities also tend to put women at a disadvantage, just as they were under colonialism. Women's secondary rights to land are being extinguished. The detailed, local level research in this volume not only challenges the status quo, but demonstrates that another world is possible and documents the many ways women in Eastern Africa are finding to ensure their rights to land.

This book explores the gendered dimensions of recent land governance transformations across the globe in the wake of unprecedented pressures on land and natural resources. These complex contemporary forces are reconfiguring livelihoods and impacting women’s positions, their tenure security and well-being, and that of their families. Bringing together fourteen empirical community case studies from around the world, the book examines governance transformations of land and land-based resources resulting from four major processes of tenure change: commercial land based investments, the formalization of customary tenure, the privatization of communal lands, and post-conflict resettlement and redistribution reforms. Each contribution carefully analyses the gendered dimensions of these transformations, exploring both the gender impact of the land tenure reforms and the social and political economy within which these reforms materialize. The cases provide important insights for decision makers to better promote and design an effective gender lens into land tenure reforms and natural resource management policies. This book will be of great interest to researchers engaging with land and natural resource management issues from a wide variety of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, development studies, and political science, as well as policy makers, practitioners, and activists concerned with environment, development, and social equity.