A Less Gendered Access to Land? The Impact of Tanzania's New Wave of Land Reform

Abstract

Contemporary land reforms in sub-Saharan Africa tend to be evaluated based on the state-centric reforms of the past, which disadvantaged women. However, this article argues that the new-wave of land reforms and their decentralised administration institutions and anti-discriminatory legal frameworks may be different. Based on field research on the implementation of Tanzania's 1999 Land Acts, it identifies an institutional reconfiguration in which the formal institutions are gradually strengthened and the customary institutions slowly changed. This does not in itself pose a threat to women's access to land and some women, who are otherwise often perceived to be weak, are left better-off. Nevertheless, access to land becomes socially more uneven.ownership, it also provides protection for women's rights to land. It makes it clear that the village councils, which are vested with power over the administration of village land, should also protect the rights of women. The responsibility thus moves away from the women themselves. This is important because African women's access to land has often been described as gendered, being mediated through their relationships with their husbands and male relatives (Yngstrom, 2002; Jacobs, 2002: 889;Jackson, 2003;Odgaard, 2006).The article identifies significant alterations in the relationship between access, gender and land-administration institutions which affects women in various ways. The reform's decentralisation element gradually strengthens the role of the more formal institutions in mediating access to land. For some groups of women, especially widowed and divorced women, these institutions improve access and make it less gendered. This confirms recent, but still limited, empirical evidence from similar policy interventions to the effect that gender-progressive policies can have a positive impact on women's access to land (Ikdahl, 2010;Quisumbing and Pandolfelli, 2010;Dancer, 2013). However, Tanzanian land reform has not been able to eradicate gender inequalities altogether. For most women, their relationships with male relatives remain important.In order to capture these gradual changes and intermediate institutional forms I suggest distinguishing between more and less formal institutions, rather than focusing on full-scale formalisation. Inspired by Keith Hart (2008: 11), a pioneer in the study of the informal economy, I do not equate formal institutions with state bureaucracies. More pragmatically, he emphasises regularity and the relationship to the bureaucracy as the defining features of formal institutions. This provides a focus on a broader range of land-administration institutions, including customary ones, which may operate with the backing of the state. Rather than replacing the customary institutions altogether, the article argues that Tanzania's new-wave land reform contributes to a reconfiguration of institutions at the local level in which the formal institutions are gradually strengthened and the customary institutions slowly changed.Since it is a new-wave lan...

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