Zimbabwe's ‘Fast Track’ Land Reform: What about women?

Goebel, Allison

doi:10.1080/09663690500094799

Cited by 40 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Our findings suggest that efforts to increase women's access to land within the FTLRP may have been ineffective, in line with concerns posed by Goebel (2005); the more male adults in a household, the more likely it is to benefit from the FTLRP. Customarily in Zimbabwe, rights to land have been reserved for men and, thus, the more men a household has, the greater the comparative advantage with regards to land access.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 52%

Fast Track Land Reform Programme, tenure security and investments in soil conservation: Micro‐evidence from Mazowe District in Zimbabwe

Zikhali¹

2010

Natural Resources Forum

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The government of Zimbabwe launched the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) in 2000 as part of its ongoing land reform and resettlement programme which aims to address a racially skewed land distribution. Its goal has been to accelerate both land acquisition and redistribution, targeting at least five million hectares of land for resettlement. This paper investigates the impact of the FTLRP on its beneficiaries' perceptions of land tenure security, and how these subsequently impacted soil conservation investments. Evidence suggests that the programme created some tenure insecurity, which adversely affected soil conservation investments among its beneficiaries. We find support for the contention that households make land‐related investments to enhance security of tenure. The results underscore the need for the government of Zimbabwe to clarify and formalize land tenure arrangements within the programme.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 52%

Fast Track Land Reform Programme, tenure security and investments in soil conservation: Micro‐evidence from Mazowe District in Zimbabwe

Zikhali¹

2010

Natural Resources Forum

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“…Local social norms favoring men in land tenure issues have been internalized and reproduced by government policy. For example, land reform in Zimbabwe seems to have been quite unfavorable to women (70). Koopman (71) argues that giving women's issues short shrift in Senegal led to ineffective expenditures of upwards of $2 billion in agricultural modernization projects.…”

Section: Gendered Social Normsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gendered production and consumption in rural Africa

Kevane

2011

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Recent research underscores the continued importance of gender in rural Africa. Analysis of interactions within households is becoming more sophisticated and continues to reject the unitary model. There is some evidence of discriminatory treatment of girls relative to boys, although the magnitudes of differential investments in health and schooling are not large and choices seem quite responsive to changes in opportunity costs. Social norms proscribing and prescribing male and female economic behavior remain substantial, extending into many domains, especially land tenure. Gender constructions are constantly evolving, although there is little evidence of rapid, transformative change in rural areas.agriculture | development | women T he economic lives of people in many parts of rural Africa are deeply gendered. Farm activities have sex valences. Handling the plow is work for men, and guiding the oxen is work for women; rice is planted by women, and cotton is managed by men. Rural households often invest less in girl children than boy children. Governments assign programs and projects to the different sexes: microfinance for women and pesticides for men. Local judges interpret custom and law as properly gendered. A wife hoping to inherit her husband's land may find herself evicted by his brother. These are illustrative generalizations, of course, and not facts. There is considerable variation across regions and ethnic groups and over time. However, there can be little doubt that gendered structures and choices and ensuing gendered life trajectories are important and complex. This article reviews an expanding literature that examines the mechanisms involved, programs and policies designed around these mechanisms, and effects of public action and large-scale change regarding gendered social structures in rural Africa.Gender is best thought of as a set of shared discursive habits relating to males and females. These habits encompass but are not limited to cognitive characterizations of gendered behaviors, expectations about gendered actions, and gendered decision algorithms. The habits guide people when they think about how other people might react to proposed action. Sometimes, the habits agree with a person's reasoned judgment, and sometimes, they do not, in which case a person might experience mental distress and cognitive dissonance. The actions under consideration range from the ordinary chores of everyday living to the infrequent and worrisome markers of life changes and from the private utterances intended for oneself to formal public pronouncements. These actions by individuals are evaluated by people in a community, and over time in-

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“…Feminist work articulating the gendered subjectivities associated with new forms of governance, new institutional practices, and how these are played out within institutions and organisations, is a fertile area for further study. As both Goebel (2005) and Chouinard (2004) are saying, there is need for a new feminist theory of the state, rather than just examination of its effects.…”

Section: Space Gender and Institutions 21mentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Goebel (2005) examines how the national government is actively excluding small scale women farmers (usually effective farmers and of which there are many) from access to land by (1) allowing a very violent process of change in which males are privileged by the very violence of the proceedings, and (2) developing a process of claiming land by which traditional owners use grounds of 'sacredness or historical claims of having ancestors come from those places' (Goebel, 2005, p. 158). The national Women and Land Lobby Group, formed in 1998, has lobbied the government about improving the entitlements of married women on land titles and leasing documents.…”

Section: Space Gender and Institutions 17mentioning

confidence: 97%

Space, Gender and Institutions in Processes Creating Difference

Fincher

2007

Gender, Place & Culture

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Along with a number of scholars in feminist, English-language geography, the author makes a case for renewed attention to be paid to causal processes of differentiation in the analysis of geographies of gender. In particular, she argues for a greater concern with the gendered spatiality of organisations and institutions themselves, rather than seeing them as 'black boxes', or unchanging and exogenous aspects of the contexts to be analysed. The paper discusses the manner and the extent to which feminist geographies have examined differentiating processes associated with three notional 'sites' examined closely in feminist geography: the city, the family and the nation. Feminist Geographies of Women and of DifferenceIn English-speaking human geography, as many have noted, geographies of women's experiences began to be developed in the 1970s and 1980s. It had became clear to a generation of white women geographers in universities that their experiences were not influentially present in the geographic literature, and that effort was required to remedy this situation. Vivid in my memory is my participation in a panel at an AAG meeting in the early 1980s when I was a new Assistant Professor in Canada. On the panel with me were three eminent, senior, male geographers, one of whom I asked why he never mentioned the importance of gender in the spatial social theory about class relations that he was developing with great success. 'Oh', he said, 'it's your job to do that.' And maybe it was, though clearly he saw gender as solely about women and so a matter for them. Jan Monk is one geographer who has made an immense contribution to the task of establishing geographies of gender-in her own writing and researching about women's geographies, in her work establishing international collaborative research partnerships so that women's geographies can be documented in countries beyond the English-speaking western democracies, and in diagnosing, supporting and very often creating the organisational structures that

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Zimbabwe's ‘Fast Track’ Land Reform: What about women?

Cited by 40 publications

References 21 publications

Fast Track Land Reform Programme, tenure security and investments in soil conservation: Micro‐evidence from Mazowe District in Zimbabwe

Fast Track Land Reform Programme, tenure security and investments in soil conservation: Micro‐evidence from Mazowe District in Zimbabwe

Gendered production and consumption in rural Africa

Space, Gender and Institutions in Processes Creating Difference

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