Journal

2 Shahraof Agrarian Change, Vol. 3 Nos. 1 and 2, January and April 2003, pp. 2–32.
Razavi

Introduction: Agrarian Change,

Gender and Land Rights

SHAHRA RAZAVI

Neo-liberal economic agendas are impacting on rural livelihoods and people’s

attachment to, and functions of, land in rural and non-rural household eco-
nomies differently in diverse contexts; the present collection of papers explores
the gender specificities of these impacts. With the deceleration of more formal
forms of employment, the diversification of rural livelihoods, and the intensi-
fication of women’s unpaid and casual labour in agriculture and the informal
sector, the land question has taken on a new urgency and needs to be posed in
a new light. Given women’s centrality to diversified livelihoods, and their
increasing political agency, their interests in land (both as wives/daughters
within male-dominated households and as members of vulnerable social
classes and communities that face the risk of land alienation and entitlement
failure in the context of liberalization) are more politicized today as well as
being more contested. The interface between gender and land is contextually
specific and cannot be adequately addressed through all-purpose global policy
prescriptions.
Keywords: gender, land tenure, livelihoods, diversification,
neo-liberalism

BACKGROUND
The past two decades have witnessed significant shifts in global development
agendas and policies, marked by a resurgence of laissez-faire orthodoxies and a
marked ambivalence, if not outright hostility, towards the ‘heavy-handed’ devel-
opmental state. The debt crises of the early 1980s and the subsequent multilateral
lending programmes provided a decisive opening for the international financial
institutions (IFIs) to impose a neo-liberal agenda of fiscal restraint, open trade
and capital accounts, and privatization on indebted developing countries.

Shahra Razavi, Research Coordinator, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development
(UNRISD), Palais des Nations, 1211 Geneva 10, Switzerland. e-mail: razavi@[Link]
The author would like to thank Terry Byres for extensive comments, advice and support in
bringing together this special issue; Ann Whitehead, Deniz Kandiyoti and Cherryl Walker for their
helpful comments on the Introduction; Caroline Danloy for excellent research assistance; and all
contributing authors for agreeing to make numerous rounds of revision. Funding for the UNRISD
project ‘Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights’ was provided by Sida, UNDP, FAO as well as
the governments of Denmark, Finland, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and
the United Kingdom which provide UNRISD’s core funds.

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Henry Bernstein and Terence J. Byres 2003.

JOAC3_1_2C02 2 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 Introduction: Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights 3

Issues of agrarian change and rural development have been a palpable part of
these policy shifts. The neoliberal attack on the post-World War Two consensus
was built on a deep aversion to state-led import substituting industrialization,
while agriculture featured as the centrepiece of the narrative in national eco-
nomies where agriculture formed a high proportion of GDP. Here alleged ‘urban
bias’ was to be corrected by ‘getting prices right’ through various measures, such
as exchange rate devaluation, abolishing export taxes and reducing trade barriers,
while tenure insecurity was to be tackled through land titling (e.g. World Bank
1989). These standard measures, it was argued, would restore agricultural export
growth and improve rural incomes and livelihoods. At the same time, cutbacks
in public expenditure outlays on agricultural input subsidies, marketing boards,
and research and extension services (representing an inflow of resources into
agriculture that was largely ignored by proponents of ‘urban bias’) were pre-
scribed and justified on the grounds that state expenditure needed to be signific-
antly lowered and that the benefits were, in any case, either being captured by
big farmers or squandered by state officials. Ironically, these public expenditure
outlays were eroded at a time when they were most needed – when developing
countries were being urged to open up their economies to global agricultural
markets by intensifying their export thrust and exposing themselves to imports
from countries that often provide generous agricultural subsidies to their farm-
ing sectors.
Gender concerns have made a shadowy, and less than satisfactory, appearance
in these global policy debates. In the early 1980s, as a result of criticisms by
feminists that structural adjustment policies were failing to recognize social re-
production as a set of activities that were essential to the economy, some atten-
tion was paid by gender specialists within the World Bank to women’s role in
the reproductive economy. Later, the focus shifted to women’s role in produc-
tion at the household level in sub-Saharan Africa, in what has become known as
the ‘gender efficiency argument’ (Razavi and Miller 1995). This shift in focus –
from women’s role in reproduction to that in production – coincided with the
growing concerns about the lack of agricultural supply response in Africa.1
One strand of thinking, which has been taken up by mainstream policy insti-
tutions, uses neo-classical micro-economic analytical tools to argue that the struc-
ture of male and female incentives in farm households leads to ‘allocative
inefficiencies’ and a muted agricultural supply response (e.g. Udry et al. 1995;
Blackden and Bhanu 1999).2 In these arguments gender is thus effectively about
inequality in resource allocation. These analyses have been abstracted from a set

1
I am grateful to Ann Whitehead for pointing this out to me.
2
For a critical assessment of this literature see Whitehead (2001) and Whitehead and Kabeer (2001).
As Ann Whitehead (personal communication, April 2002) further notes, these arguments have been
widely taken up by the mainstream policy establishment, in part at least, because this kind of analysis
is compatible with the overall orthodox neo-classical position on African agriculture which sees the
absence of a land market (and other ways in which the economy is less than fully commoditized) as
the source of inefficiencies in resource use.

JOAC3_1_2C02 3 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 4 Shahra Razavi

of empirical accounts of agricultural production in sub-Saharan Africa. One im-

portant resource constraint to which they draw attention is women’s inadequate
access to land – attributed to patriarchal land tenure institutions – while disre-
garding other constraints (such as inadequate command of labour and capital,
and inaccessible markets) which tend to be far more debilitating as far as women
smallholders in the region are concerned (Whitehead 2001).
The 1990s have also been a period of monumental political transformations.
The collapse of authoritarian regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,
Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, has given issues of rights and democracy a
major impulse (Molyneux and Razavi 2002). The decade saw the growing size and
influence of an international women’s movement, linked through sub-regional,
regional and international networks and able to collaborate on issues of policy and
agenda setting. This has coincided with the revival of national women’s move-
ments, which in post-authoritarian settings in particular have found themselves
in a position to press for political and legal reforms. An important component of
these broader processes of democratization have been political and institutional
reforms such as decentralization, which have revived and strengthened the insti-
tutions of local governance. While in some countries this has brought more women
into government structures, questions remain as to how local, and indeed national,
power relations feed into these local and community-based structures.
Inspired by these democratizing impulses, a wide range of feminist groups
and networks, operating at national, regional and international levels, and influ-
enced by the increasing use of rights language and instruments, have drawn
attention to unequal land rights as an important mechanism through which
female poverty and subordination is sustained and reproduced. Whether in the
context of national debates on land tenure reform, rural social movement activ-
ism or the political dynamics associated with decentralization and the competing
claims over resources that this has given rise to, women’s interests in land have
emerged as a contested issue. In some country contexts, tensions and divisions
have emerged within civil society ranks: while some policy advocates have been
pushing for women’s unambiguous rights to land as a ‘good’ policy interven-
tion (because it is presumed to enhance their intra-household bargaining power,
irrespective of broader contextual forces), others have opposed women’s land
rights categorically because it is seen as the thin end of the wedge used by pro-
liberalization lobbies to open up ‘customary’ systems of land management to
market forces and foreign commercial interests.3 This is a dangerous dichotomy
which precludes the kind of nuanced and conceptualized analysis that is needed
to identify situations where inadequate access to land constitutes a serious con-
straint on women’s agricultural enterprises. Nor can it facilitate appropriate policy
suggestions to enhance greater justice with respect to resource allocation for rural
women – both as wives/daughters within male-dominated households and as
members of vulnerable social classes and communities that face the risk of land
alienation and entitlement failure in the context of liberalization.

3
For an illustration of this point in the case of Tanzania, see Tsikata’s contribution to this special issue.

JOAC3_1_2C02 4 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 Introduction: Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights 5

The contributions to this special issue critically reflect on the broad set of
issues that have been raised in both the academic literature as well as in policy
debates on the interface between gender and land. Different aspects of the gender
and land question are explored by the contributing authors. The analysis that
they bring to bear on the subject is informed by different understandings of
gender relations and the most important arenas within which those relations
operate. Yet despite their crucial conceptual and methodological variations, and
their different entry points, together they constitute a strong statement on the
importance of taking the contextual specificities of the gender and land question
seriously. They also agree broadly on the inadequacies of policy prescriptions
that rely on the magic of ‘the market’ and downplay the role of the state, while
underscoring the crucial task of making the state more democratic and account-
able to all its citizens irrespective of gender and class.

ORGANIZATION OF THE SPECIAL ISSUE

The contributions to this special issue fall under two parts. The first part includes
two broad-ranging articles, which provide an empirically grounded and theoret-
ically informed engagement with some of the principal themes of the special
issue – neoliberal macroeconomic policies, agricultural liberalization and the re-
form of land tenure institutions. The second part consists of country case studies,
examining the diverse ways in which gender structures are implicated in the
reproduction of the rural economy and the transformation of land tenure ar-
rangements in the different settings.
The special issue opens with two panoramic papers, by Utsa Patnaik, and Ann
Whitehead and Dzodzi Tsikata, respectively. The contribution by Utsa Patnaik
analyses the neoliberal policy agenda and its deflationary impacts on the large
number of countries which have undergone loan-conditional structural adjust-
ment and trade liberalization over the past two decades, by theoretically situating
the recent period of neoliberal ascendancy (1980–2002) with respect to the his-
torical experience of deflationism of the inter-War era (1925–35). The histor-
ically informed analysis of neoliberalism is juxtaposed against the present day
impacts of liberalization and adjustment on rural livelihoods, land use and food
security based on a country case study of India. While not directly concerned
with the gender-differentiated impacts of neoliberal macroeconomic policies,
the paper’s analysis of deflationism and liberalization provides the essential
background for understanding the broader macroeconomic policies and forces
that are shaping rural livelihoods and land tenure arrangements in developing
countries.
The paper by Ann Whitehead and Dzodzi Tsikata is a study of policy discourses
about land tenure in sub-Saharan Africa – a continent where the IFIs have made
policy interventions of unparalleled range and depth over the past two decades,
based on a rather thin understanding of the social and economic institutions that
they have set out to ‘adjust’ and ‘reform’. It is the specificities of African land
tenure arrangements and their very particular implications for women’s land

JOAC3_1_2C02 5 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 6 Shahra Razavi

access that the authors are at pains to highlight. They are deeply apprehensive
about one-size-fits-all gender and development prescriptions that still advocate
a blanket policy of ensuring women’s land access through titling, without any
reference to these African specificities. The paper provides a brief account
of how African land tenure arrangements have changed and been transformed
in colonial, post-colonial and current settings in the context of rapid socio-
economic change and policy interventions by an array of international, national
and local actors and interests. Throughout, the authors highlight and explore
historical shifts in thinking and the evidential and theoretical, as well as political
and ideological, factors affecting these shifts. They examine an emerging con-
sensus among policy advocates from very different political and ideological posi-
tions, that rejects the older idea of making a complete rupture with ‘customary’
systems of land tenure, and instead stresses building on ‘the customary’. Draw-
ing on other feminist literature on women and the state, they discuss some of the
potential problems that such a return to ‘the customary’ will pose for contempor-
ary African women.
The second part of the special issue consists of five country case studies from
diverse regional contexts – sub-Saharan Africa (South Africa, Tanzania), South
Asia (India), Central Asia (Uzbekistan) and Latin America (Brazil). They provide
situated analyses of agrarian change, land tenure reform and gender structures,
but their contours and entry points are different, reflecting the particular agrarian
histories, current processes of land tenure reform and the on-going preoccupa-
tions of women’s movements and advocates in the different countries.
Tables 1 and 2 provide a rough comparative picture of the significance of the
agricultural sector to the national economies of these five countries: the contribu-
tion of the agricultural sector to GDP (Table 1), and the percentage of the eco-
nomically active population in the agricultural sector (Table 2). At one end of the
spectrum are South Africa and Brazil, where the agricultural sector today makes
a relatively small contribution to GDP (3.2 per cent and 7.4 per cent, respect-
ively), while Tanzania appears at the opposite end with the agricultural sector
contributing a far more significant share of GDP (45.1 per cent). Uzbekistan and
India (with 34.9 per cent and 24.9 per cent, respectively) fall somewhere

Table 1. Percentage of GDP from agriculture

1980 1990 1999 2000

South Africa 6.2 4.6 3.4 3.2

Brazil 11.0 8.1 7.2 7.4
India 38.6 31.3 26.2 24.9
Uzbekistan – 32.8 33.5 34.9
Tanzania – 46.0 44.8 45.1

Source: The World Bank, Country at a Glance Tables, [Link]/data/,

accessed on 11 March 2002.

JOAC3_1_2C02 6 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 Introduction: Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights 7

Table 2. Percentage of employment in agriculture

1980 1990 2000

South Africa 17.29 13.49 9.59

Brazil 36.67 23.28 16.69
Uzbekistan – – 27.65
India 69.53 64.02 59.64
Tanzania 85.78 84.41 80.45

Source: FAO, FAOSTAT Agriculture Data, [Link], accessed on 21 March 2002.

in-between the two extremes. The labour force statistics produce a roughly
similar ranking of the country case studies. Corresponding to agriculture’s
relatively small contribution to GDP, South Africa and Brazil also have the
lowest proportion of economically active population engaged in the agricultural
sector (9.59 per cent and 16.69 per cent, respectively), while Tanzania has the
highest proportion (80.45 per cent). Again, Uzbekistan (27.65 per cent) and
India (59.64 per cent) fall in-between the two extremes. However, while the
agricultural sector contributes a higher proportion of the GDP in Uzbekistan
than it does in India, it seems to absorb a lower share of the economically active
population in Uzbekistan compared to India.
In her contribution to this special issue, Cherryl Walker examines the disjunc-
ture between high-level policy commitments to gender equality in South Africa’s
on-going land reform programme, and weaknesses in translating these lofty
policy principles into vigorous action on the ground. The South African agrarian
scene is deeply marked by a brutal history of colonial forced dispossession in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the ferocious racial inequalities of land
dispensation put in place by successive minority white governments after 1910.
This was accompanied by a programme of spatial control, which forcefully re-
settled more than 3.5 million black people out of what were deemed ‘white’ areas
and into labour reserves, or ‘bantustans’. For much of the twentieth century, the
bantustans served as labour reserves for the mining and industrial centres of the
country, whereby government policies targeted men as migrant labourers and
women as the reproducers of an impoverished subsistence economy within the
reserves. The land reform programme that emerged out of the constitutional
negotiations and policy debates of the early 1990s attempted to combine a strong
commitment to the goals of social justice and redress – including an explicit
commitment to gender justice – with the principles of market-led land reform.
Yet, a decade later it can be argued that the commitment to gender equity has
operated mainly at the level of lofty principle – a kind of ‘piety in the sky’. To
explain the disjuncture between high-level policy principles and on-the-ground
action, Walker’s account examines the wide range of factors – macroeconomic,
socio-political, institutional and conceptual – which have shaped and constrained
government policy vis-à-vis land.

JOAC3_1_2C02 7 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 8 Shahra Razavi

Land tenure in Tanzania also bears the imprint of colonial policies character-
istic of ‘Africa of the labour reserves’ (Amin 1972)4 in the form of massive land
dispossession and a pro-white settler policy. However, given the much earlier
establishment of independent African rule together with the particular character-
istics of Tanzania’s road to modernization, agrarian relations and land tenure
arrangements present an altogether different scenario to that found in South
Africa. Despite considerable regional and ethnic heterogeneity, Tanzania has been
described as a nation of predominantly ‘peasant farmers, who, virtually without
exception, endeavour[ed] to provision their own staple food needs’ (Bryceson
1993, 2). Post-colonial agricultural policy, in the form of Ujamaa or ‘African
socialism’, entailed extensive state intervention in the agricultural sector. In addi-
tion to state attempts to accelerate industrialization, this involved ‘villagization’
or the physical relocation of the mass of the rural population into concentrated
village settlements where they were supplied with basic social services, while at
the same time marketing boards, crop authorities and cooperatives were also
extended to these settlements for the supervision and control of peasant agricul-
tural production (Gibbon 1995). As far as land tenure was concerned, the post-
colonial government did not pursue the route of individualization, titling and
registration, as occurred in Kenya and some other countries. In the 1980s, how-
ever, the government’s commitment to the policy of ‘villagization’ was reversed
and the conditions were created for the increasing liberalization of agriculture.
This has also coincided with a process of democratic opening. It is within this
contentious liberalizing context that the policy proposals on land tenure reform
were developed and debated beginning in 1992. In her contribution to this spe-
cial issue, Dzodzi Tsikata documents and analyses the debates and controversies
between government officials, academics, and various activist groups and net-
works around land tenure reform, focusing in particular on how women’s inter-
ests in land were understood and debated by these actors. Some of the key
themes and questions that emerge from the Whitehead and Tsikata contribution
– the reappraisal of ‘customary’ laws, the limits of statutory interventions, local
level land tenure institutions as a site of unequal social relations – are explored
further in the light of Tanzania’s agrarian economy and the recent land policy
debates.
Echoing Patnaik’s analysis of the general stagnation of rural non-farm em-
ployment in India in the post-reform period, Bina Agarwal argues that for women
the slowing down of rural non-farm employment opportunities in recent years
has been dramatic. In other words, as more men shift to urban or rural non-farm
employment, while non-farm employment opportunities for women stagnate,
an increasing number of households will become dependent on women bearing

4
According to Samir Amin (1972), what defined ‘Africa of the labour reserves’ was the fact that
capital at the centre needed to have a large proletariat immediately available. This was because there
was great mineral wealth to be exploited. In order to obtain the necessary labour, the colonizers
dispossessed the African communities (sometimes by violence) and drove them deliberately into
small, poor regions with no means of modernizing and intensifying their farming.

JOAC3_1_2C02 8 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 Introduction: Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights 9

the larger burden of cultivation and farm management. This in turn means that
the issue of secure land rights for women is becoming even more important, for
both productivist and equality reasons that are examined in her article. What
then are the prospects for enhancing women’s land access? Agarwal explores the
three main sources of arable land in India today – the state, the family and the
market – and, in relation to market access, she makes a departure from current
discussions by focusing on various forms of collective investment and cultivation
by women, mediated by NGOs. It is argued that these institutional innovations,
which have helped landless women use subsidized credit to lease-in or purchase
land in groups and cultivate it jointly, can provide the basis for reviving land
reform in a radically new form.
In the case of Uzbekistan, as Deniz Kandiyoti illustrates, it was not merely the
stagnation of non-farm employment, but the virtual collapse of public sector
employment and wages due to the crisis in public finance following the break-up
of the Soviet Union, which has had important repercussions for the agricultural
sector. Labour retrenchment in social services, rural industries and collective
farming enterprises has pushed the bulk of the rural population into reliance on
the smallholder economy (composed of household and subsidiary plots) and
precarious forms of self-employment (in informal trade and services) for their
subsistence. The agricultural sector has in effect acted as a ‘shock absorber’,
providing livelihoods for an increasing number of people. At the same time, the
state’s continued dependence on cotton as the major export crop and the stake it
retains in the maintenance of existing export revenues has made the shift away
from the institutional structures of the command economy very difficult. The
smallholder economy is thus effectively acting as a social safety net, but exists in
a symbiotic relationship with an export sector (in the form of ‘independent
farms’ and restructured collective enterprises) that is in turn tied to the state
procurement system. However, as Kandiyoti shows, a thorough understanding
of the actual workings of this mutual dependency – between smallholder agricul-
ture and the export sector – reveals the marked feminization of labour in both
sectors, whether as family or casual labour.
Agricultural reforms in Uzbekistan are sometimes compared to the Chinese
agrarian reforms initiated more than two decades ago under the Household Re-
sponsibility System (HRS). However, while the shift from work brigades to
‘family leaseholds’ in Uzbekistan was modelled on the Chinese HRS, it has not
granted farmers the decision-making freedom that was a key element of China’s
agrarian success in the 1980s. State dependence on cotton exports in Uzbekistan
is the main factor inhibiting agricultural liberalization, while in China state-
owned industrial enterprises were the state’s ‘cash cow’ during the early period
of reform (Pomfret 2000, 274), thereby reducing the state’s dependence on sur-
plus extraction from the agricultural sector. The diversification of livelihoods in
the two contexts has also taken very different routes, given the dynamic rural
industrialization process in China compared to the stagnating non-farm sector in
Uzbekistan. While women’s informal activities in rural Uzbekistan generally
constitute survivalist, low-return strategies in an overcrowded informal sector,

JOAC3_1_2C02 9 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 10 Shahra Razavi

Chinese household diversification strategies in the 1980s, which involved women

taking up wage work in township and village enterprises (TVEs) and other non-
farm enterprises, contributed to processes of accumulation.
If the state is resistant and reluctant to carry out agrarian reforms, the issue can
still be kept on the agenda and in the public eye if there are dynamic social
movements pressurizing for it ‘from below’. This has certainly been the case in
Brazil, particularly since the democratic openings of the 1980s. But the question
that Carmen Diana Deere poses is why in the midst of some of the most radical
and dynamic rural social movements to be found in Latin America, the evolution
of the demand for women’s land rights in the process of agrarian reform in Brazil
has been so slow. This question is explored by examining the manner in which
women’s land rights occasionally surfaced in some of the leading rural social
movements (the landless movement, the rural unions, the autonomous rural
women’s movement), but remained marginal to their main demands and struggles.
Where rural women’s demands were clearly articulated and persistently pursued,
these concerned their labour and social rights (paid maternity leave, entitlements
to retirement benefits, and so on); these issues apparently were of interest to all
rural women independent of their class position and thereby united the hetero-
geneous membership of the unions and the autonomous women’s movement.
However, what the article goes on to document is a more recent change in
priorities as it has become increasingly clear that the marginalization of women’s
land rights can be detrimental to the development and consolidation of the agrarian
reform settlements, and thus the landless movement itself. This realization has
grown as a result of the territorial consolidation of the landless movement and
the surge in the number of land occupations.
Having briefly sketched out the organization of the special issue, in the fol-
lowing pages we shall consider the cross-cutting issues that emerge from the
different contributions in order to place them in a broader policy context. The
discussion is organized under four sections: (1) neoliberal globalization, gender
and agrarian change; (2) agrarian transitions, diversified livelihoods and the place
of land; (3) land tenure arrangements: institutions, reforms and constraints;
(4) joint or individual titles: rethinking the agrarian household. The concluding
section then briefly draws together the special issue’s main findings.

NEOLIBERAL GLOBALIZATION,5 GENDER AND

AGRARIAN CHANGE
The economic agenda imposed by the IFIs on indebted developing countries
since the early 1980s tends to embrace a number of orthodox policies, such
as exchange rate devaluation, cuts in public spending, wage restraint, tariff

5
‘Globalization’ has become a catch-all term for many different trends; it is therefore crucial that we
clarify what we mean by it. Here we are concerned with economic globalization, which is taken to
mean greater openness of economies to international trade and capital mobility.

JOAC3_1_2C02 10 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 Introduction: Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights 11

reduction and open capital accounts. Together these measures have had a
deflationary impact on the economies undergoing reform, which has prevented
governments from dealing effectively with unemployment and underemploy-
ment. The main targets of macroeconomic policy have been low inflation and
balanced budgets, regardless of their impact on social development – and indeed,
on economic growth.6 While the disruptive social consequences of deflationary
macroeconomic policies, marked by rising levels of social inequality and
marginalization, have been widely recorded and commented upon, it is becom-
ing increasingly clear that the orthodox policies have been far from successful in
generating even moderate rates of economic growth. Economic growth has slowed
dramatically over the past two decades (1980–2000), especially in the less developed
countries, compared with the previous two decades (1960–80) (Weisbrot et al.
2000, see also Table 1 in Patnaik, this issue).
Patnaik’s contribution to this special issue provides a penetrating analysis of
the political forces underpinning neoliberal deflationary policies of the past two
decades. Deflationary macroeconomic policies combined with the removal of all
national barriers to the free movement of finance capital constitutes the core of
the policy agenda of finance capital – a narrow but powerful interest group
which has moved into a position of global dominance since the late 1970s. One
of the central arguments of her paper is that the current global crisis of liveli-
hoods is of a scale and magnitude which is unprecedented since the run-up to the
Great Depression 70 years ago, and furthermore, that the 1920s too, like the
current era of neoliberal prescriptions, was a period when finance capital was
dominant.
Two questions are of particular interest to this special issue. First, how are
deflationary macroeconomic policies impacting on livelihoods in the rural areas
of developing countries? It is the changing nature of rural livelihoods that will
affect the processes driving attachment to, and functions of, land in rural and
non-rural household economies. Second, are deflationary macroeconomic poli-
cies gendered in their content and impact? Patnaik’s contribution provides an
answer to the first question, by outlining two powerful mechanisms at work.
First, as a result of cuts in state spending, economies have become demand-
constrained in the present era; in the case of India, which is her main point of
reference, the post-1991 cuts in the state’s development expenditures to contain
the budget deficit have caused the collapse of rural non-farm employment (which
in India refers to all forms of work other than crop and livestock production, and
covers a vast variety of possible activities, both formal and informal) and rural
wages, and a consequent decline in mass incomes.

6
As Elson (2002) rightly argues, very high rates of inflation can indeed be an important problem
for poor people, but so are very low rates of inflation, which generally come with stagnant employ-
ment opportunities. Moreover, inflation can be brought under control through a number of different
mechanisms, with a varying balance between cutting expenditure on public services important to
poor people and raising taxation on the incomes of rich people.

JOAC3_1_2C02 11 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 12 Shahra Razavi

Agarwal’s account complements Patnaik’s by providing the gender content of

this collapse for India. The current employment figures suggest that 58 per cent
of all male workers, but 78 per cent of all female workers, and 86 per cent of
all rural female workers are in agriculture; and it is astonishing that for women
this percentage has declined less than four points since 1972–3. Moreover,
while Agarwal confirms that the absorption of women and men into the non-
agricultural sector has slowed down since 1987–8, and especially since 1991, for
women the deceleration has been dramatic. The figures are worth re-citing: the
compound growth rate of female non-agricultural employment fell from 5.2 per
cent over 1978–88 to 0.2 per cent over 1988–94, and during the latter period
while 29 per cent of rural male additions to the labour force in the over 14 age
group were absorbed into non-agriculture, less than 1 per cent of the additional
female workers were so absorbed. There is then a marked gender difference in
non-farm employment, which means that increasing numbers of women are
crowded into the agricultural sector and/or are taking on precarious forms of
work in the informal sector that are not picked up by the employment statistics.
The second mechanism through which deflationary macroeconomic policies
contribute to the livelihoods crisis in rural areas is the liberalization of agricul-
tural trade. In the context of deflationary macroeconomic policies, Patnaik sug-
gests, trade liberalization contributes to the collapse of primary commodity prices
and the build-up of stocks. For the developing countries as a whole, the 1980s
brought a sharp fall in the dollar price of their primary commodities, and after a
brief price upsurge for some commodities in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the
decline in commodity prices continued at an accelerated pace in the second half
of the 1990s. UNCTAD asserts that the breadth and depth of the commodity
price decline since 1998 have been unprecedented and have exerted a significant
squeeze on the economies of many developing countries (UNCTAD 1999). As
Patnaik shows, the extent of the price fall for many primary commodities be-
tween 1995 and 2000 has been as great as it had been in the period 1925–30. In
both periods, she asserts, it is not temporary ‘overproduction’ that is causing the
falling prices, but the cumulative demand deflation.
Again in the case of India, which is explored at length by Patnaik, substantial
shifts in cropping patterns occurred as trade was liberalized; it is estimated that
seven million hectares were diverted from food crops to export crops by the
mid-1990s. This had negative implications for per capita foodgrain availability,7
given the fact that the export thrust took place in a contractionary context marked
by investment cuts in agriculture. At the same time, it exposed farmers to new
sources of risk, given the volatility of international commodity prices. In the
subsequent period, as global commodity prices collapsed, farmers who had
switched to cotton found themselves enmeshed in mounting debt.

7
It is difficult to know whether the ensuing food insecurity has given rise to gender-differentiated
nutritional outcomes, especially in view of the fact that much of the earlier micro-level research
found inconclusive evidence of anti-female bias in nutritional status (Harriss 1990; Saith and Harriss-
White 1999).

JOAC3_1_2C02 12 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 Introduction: Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights 13

The account of post-socialist agricultural reforms and livelihoods crisis in

Uzbekistan that is provided by Deniz Kandiyoti provides both parallels and
contrasts with Patnaik’s account. In Uzbekistan, too, the post-Soviet stabilization
programme has been deflationary. Non-agricultural occupations – in teaching,
health services and rural industries, which represented significant employment
opportunities for women in particular – have been major casualties of the post-
Soviet recession. Many of the rural industries have either closed or operate with
a reduced workforce that receives irregular wages or payments in kind. More-
over, labour retrenchment in social services and rural industries is happening in
parallel with labour retrenchment on collective agricultural enterprises. These
collective farming enterprises (the former sovkhozes and kolkhozes which have
been restructured into Joint Stock Companies or shirkats) continue to occupy the
bulk of irrigated land and produce more than half of the country’s agricultural
output. The restructuring of these collective farming enterprises, initially from
work brigades to family leaseholds and finally to shirkats, has represented a pro-
gressive retrenchment of labour – a process that is acknowledged by many to
disproportionately affect women. The female workers who are made redundant
tend to crowd into the casual agricultural work force and/or to take up precari-
ous forms of self-employment in informal trade and services.
Uzbekistan remains dependent on cotton exports and, like other countries
relying on primary commodity exports for its foreign exchange earnings, has
suffered from the fall in international cotton prices since 1995, which has deep-
ened the crisis in public finance. However, in contrast to the situation in trade-
liberalized India, where an increasing acreage of land was being switched from
food crops to cotton in the late 1980s and early 1990s (prior to the price collapse
of 1995), in the case of Uzbekistan, the disruption of Soviet trade links in fact
forced the government to expand the acreage of land devoted to wheat (the main
food crop) through state procurement quotas,8 and to increase the size of private
plots that the population is entitled to. By 1998 the country had achieved the
goal of drastically reducing grain imports. The expansion of household plots has
entailed an intensification of women’s agricultural labour, especially as women
substitute their own labour wherever possible for expensive agricultural inputs
(fertilizers, machines, pesticides). At the same time, as a result of both growing
unemployment and of changing cropping patterns and technology,9 there has
been an increase in labour-intensive operations using casual agricultural labour,
which is heavily feminized.

8
The decisions concerning land use of collective enterprises and shirkat are made administratively
from the top and get passed down to all the localities which receive a plan concerning what acreage
will be planted with which crops.
9
Unlike cotton, wheat makes it possible to plant other crops after the harvest in June. The intro-
duction of polythene covers (which helps protect cotton from late frost) lengthens the growing
season and necessitates back-breaking work, since hoes can no longer be used for weeding and
thinning (women have to bend low under the polythene covers and weed with spoons).

JOAC3_1_2C02 13 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 14 Shahra Razavi

As for sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), there are strong indications that both export
crop and food crop sectors have performed poorly in the 1980s and 1990s, rather
than any massive crop-switching taking place (along the lines suggested by Patnaik
for India). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, SSA has witnessed the steady de-
cline of its agricultural exports as a share of the world’s agricultural trade, as well
as dramatic surges of agricultural imports, notably food, into the continent
(Bryceson 1999).10 In fact, as we noted earlier, much of the debate on structural
adjustment policies (SAPs) and African agriculture has been about the muted
supply response to price changes. By the mid-1990s, the World Bank had come
to admit that African agriculture’s response to SAPs had been disappointing,
which compelled the organization to ask ‘What nonprice factors are still con-
straining the supply response: Does the sector have adequate capacity to adjust to
changing incentives?’ (World Bank 1994, cited in Mkandawire and Soludo 2000,
53–4) – questions that critics of SAPs had been raising over the years.
These critics have argued that the objective of getting prices right was far
from adequate under the prevailing African conditions. The excessive focusing
on prices, they claim, took attention away from other problems and constraints,
such as the feebleness of commodity and financial markets, structural bottle-
necks, the immense climatic uncertainties and the low levels of irrigation and
fertilizer use (Binswanger 1989; UNCTAD 1998; CUTS 1999; Mkandawire and
Soludo 2000). Moreover, SAPs largely dismantled African marketing boards and
parastatals, which had serviced smallholders’ input requirements, provided mar-
keting channels to geographically dispersed and under-capitalized farmers, and
enforced commodity standards (Wold 1997; Bryceson 1999; MAFF 1999; Oxfam-
IDS 1999; Deininger and Olinto 2000; Winters 2000). The private traders that
have come to replace them vary in their performance through time and space,
but mounting evidence suggests that, with their patchy marketing services, they
have not lived up to the hopes vested in them by the IFIs (Wold 1997; Bryceson
1999; MAFF 1999; Oxfam-IDS 1999; Deininger and Olinto 2000; Winters 2000).
It is in the context of these debates that the micro-economic gender literature,
referred to briefly in the Background section, has come to identify the intra-
household structure of male and female incentives in African farm households as
a major source of ‘allocative inefficiency’ and the muted supply response of
African agriculture to price changes.11 But, as Whitehead (2001) argues, the evid-
ence and arguments that are presented by this set of literature are not very
convincing as accounts of the economic imperatives and constraints that exist for
both women and men smallholder farmers in SSA. Not only do some of the

10
It is noteworthy that countries like Nigeria departed from the standard SAP package prescrip-
tions by banning staple food imports (in the early stages of SAP implementations and again more
recently). This in turn provided an opportunity for domestic food producers to sustain their produc-
tion for the urban markets without the threat of being undercut by cheaper foreign imports (Bryceson
1999).
11
Whitehead (2001) provides what is probably one of the most up-to-date and comprehensive
analyses of the empirical studies on which the more abstract modelling exercises have been built.

JOAC3_1_2C02 14 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 Introduction: Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights 15

empirical studies adopt a very narrow focus (e.g. treating the production of a
single crop in isolation from the farming and livelihood system as a whole), but
with their attention focused on the intra-household structure of incentives (e.g.
women’s poor incentives arising out of separate resource streams in farm house-
holds) as the explanation for a muted supply response, they effectively exclude
from consideration a much more important set of constraints that are to be found
in women’s difficulties in accessing resources, especially their weak command of
labour, their severe capital constraints, as well as their difficulties in accessing
markets. ‘Here again, the literature picks out land rights as highly significant,
but this emphasis seems to be grounded in theoretical rather than empirical
considerations’ (Whitehead 2001, 26–7).
From these brief observations, we can then draw out a number of feasible
gender implications. First, the evidence cited above seems to suggest that defla-
tionary macroeconomic policies can have a particularly detrimental impact on
the formal employment opportunities for women; in both Uzbekistan and India
the retrenchment of employment has disproportionately affected women. As
Elson and Cagatay (2000, 1355) observe more broadly, the deflationary bias of
macroeconomic policy has ‘a disproportionately negative effect on women . . .
Women in the formal sector tend to lose their jobs faster than men, and usually
have worse access than men to social safety nets. They crowd into the informal
sector, driving down earnings there’. These two authors also draw attention to a
second source of gender bias in deflationary macroeconomic policies which is
not highlighted by our case studies, namely the intensification of women’s care
work as a result of cutbacks in public expenditure outlays on social services
which forces women to become the ‘unpaid provisioners as of last resort’ (Elson
and Cagatay 2000, 1355).
But as far as the impacts of trade and agricultural liberalization on export
performance are concerned, our country case studies provide diverse scenarios.
Some countries have accelerated their agricultural export thrust (e.g. India) at the
expense of domestic food crop production and food security, with dire con-
sequences as farming households have become exposed to the vagaries of world
commodity markets in a deflationary context. In some of the other case studies,
agricultural supply response has been sluggish at best, if not downright negative.
In many sub-Saharan African countries, agricultural exports have performed
rather poorly, while food crop production has also suffered as a result of import
liberalization and multiple infrastructural and institutional inadequacies. Here
women smallholders continue to encounter severe constraints on their agricul-
tural operations, although the nature of those constraints is the subject of con-
troversy. We shall return to this question below, when we look at the debates
about African land tenure arrangements and women smallholders. In Uzbekistan,
abrupt change in the external environment – the decision to accelerate wheat
cultivation as a result of the sudden disruption of Soviet trade links – affected
agricultural production. Here there has been an intensification of female labour
in the subsistence sector (the expanded household plots) as well as in the export
cotton sector.

JOAC3_1_2C02 15 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 16 Shahra Razavi

AGRARIAN TRANSITIONS, DIVERSIFIED LIVELIHOODS

AND THE PLACE OF LAND
An important view emerging from both Marxist and non-Marxist analyses of
successful capitalist transformation, and indeed one important requirement of
successful agrarian transitions, is the shift of labour from agriculture to indus-
try.12 The historical record of advanced industrialized countries certainly con-
firms this view, even though the paths taken have been significantly diverse. But
what is striking about the contemporary record of structural change as it is
unfolding in the developing countries is the limited extent to which capitalist
industrialization, even where it is proceeding, is able to absorb labour, as well as
the disproportionate weight assumed by the heterogeneous category of ‘services’
(Byres forthcoming). This clearly marks a significant departure from the histor-
ical record, and it can be taken to suggest ‘an unresolved agrarian question: in
terms of social property relations in the countryside that, unlike those experi-
enced historically, or more recently in Taiwan and South Korea, have blocked
a sufficient contribution to capitalist industrialization by agriculture’ (Byres
forthcoming). In other words, very unequal forms of land distribution in the
countryside have blocked agriculture’s potential contribution to capitalist indus-
trialization. This is one interpretation of contemporary agrarian change – a view
that is supported by comparative analyses of successful ‘late industrialization’ in
East Asia with less successful attempts in Latin America (Kay 2001) and South
Africa (Hart 1996, 2001).13
But an important feature of agrarian change and industrialization in contem-
porary developing societies – which is not problematized by the classical Marxist
model of agrarian transition, and is perhaps buried under the inflated figures for
‘services’ – is the growing prevalence of livelihood diversification, defined as ‘the
process by which rural families construct a diverse portfolio of activities and
social support capabilities in their struggle for survival and in order to improve
their standard of living’ (Ellis 1998, 4). As Ellis goes on to argue, and as is
evident from the contributions to this special issue, making any generalizations
about the meaning of diversification is hazardous, since the forces underpinning
it and the outcomes flowing from it are both extremely diverse – depending
on geographical location, assets, income, opportunity and social relations.

12
In addition to labour contributions, the other important contributions that agriculture can make
to economic growth and industrialization are: (a) capital and entrepreneurs (i.e. landlords or capitalist
farmers who then become industrialists and merchants); (b) agricultural commodities as cheap food
and other wage goods; and (c) a domestic market for industrial commodities.
13
Kay (2001) and Hart (1996) emphasize different aspects of this question. Kay argues that the
relatively equitable income distribution in East Asia, as a result of land reform in the countryside,
widened the size of the domestic market for industrial commodities, which is particularly important
in the initial stages of industrialization. In Latin America, however, the limited extent of agrarian
reform coupled with the fact that it was implemented several decades after the onset of industrializa-
tion, denied the region this potential widening of the domestic market and created a distorted and
inefficient industrial structure. Hart’s focus, as the following paragraphs illustrate, is on the contribu-
tion that agriculture (and redistributive land reforms) can make to the ‘social wage’ and the satisfact-
ory reproduction of labour as a precondition for successful industrial accumulation (Hart 2001).

JOAC3_1_2C02 16 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 Introduction: Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights 17

Diversification thus refers to several different economic processes and its blanket
use to describe all forms of non-farm employment hides important differences. It
is particularly important, from the point of view of thinking about how to lift
farming households out of poverty, to distinguish between diversification as a
survival strategy and diversification that feeds into a process of accumulation
(Hart 1994; Whitehead and Kabeer 2001). One finding that emerges from some
of the contributions to this special issue is the tendency for women to be con-
fined to the less lucrative segments of the non-farm sector, in the form of
survivalist strategies, which do not offer good long-term prospects. This seems
to be the case in both India and Uzbekistan.
In the case of India, Agarwal argues that women tend to be largely concen-
trated in the low-and-insecure-earnings end of the non-farm occupational spec-
trum, which she attributes to their domestic work burden, lower physical
mobility, lesser education and fewer assets. Similarly, Kandiyoti’s research in
rural Uzbekistan shows that women are crowded into precarious forms of self-
employment in informal trade and services, which have a very limited market
since there is an oversupply of such services. While there are exceptions, such as
the more lucrative cross-border trading operations, this avenue is open to a small
minority of women with ‘courage, wit and resourcefulness’. In conclusion, she
thus notes that whereas some skilled men may achieve more sustainable forms
of self-employment, women’s survival strategies in rural Uzbekistan have
involutionary properties that do not offer good long-term prospects.14
Under what circumstances then can a more dynamic interaction between the
agrarian and industrial sectors be created? China is often singled out as a country
where such positive synergies were successfully forged. Here the diversification
of income-earning opportunities for rural residents has taken the form of both
farm-based businesses and non-farm employment (in TVEs and foreign-owned
export-oriented industries). While the land reforms under HRS boosted incomes
from farming in the first half of the 1980s, the TVEs and other non-farm em-
ployment provided the main stimulus to rural incomes afterwards (Summerfield
2002). These activities seem to have provided an avenue of accumulation for
rural residents, including women, even though gender inequalities in wages and
work conditions persist. Nevertheless, both employment in TVEs and the set-
ting up of some forms of off-farm sidelines seem to have added substantially to
women’s incomes and exerted a positive impact on their intra-household posi-
tion (Summerfield 2002).
Summerfield (2002) argues that it was the higher incomes from farming,
brought about as a result of the HRS, which initially provided the necessary
investment funds for enterprises run by townships and villages. In addition,
some villages had retained funds from the collective period, which they invested

14
A recent review of the literature on the non-farm sector in sub-Saharan Africa reached similar
conclusions, namely that the non-farm sector is segmented by gender and that women tend to be
crowded into the low-profit niches of trading and services (Whitehead 2001).

JOAC3_1_2C02 17 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 18 Shahra Razavi

in TVEs. Later, a substantial inflow of funds came through foreign direct invest-
ment (FDI), much of it from overseas Chinese. However, as Chris Bramall
(2000) has convincingly shown by analysing the experience of four very different
regions of China, these external sources of growth (i.e. FDI and growing ex-
ports) were far less significant than is often claimed, while domestic sources,
including financial flows from agriculture, have been crucial to Chinese accumu-
lation.15 In turn, the cash income from non-farm employment is invested in
other household activities, including green revolution agricultural technology
and animal husbandry (Bramall and Jones 2000).
It has been argued that successful industrialization in the East Asian countries
of Taiwan and China was built on changes in agrarian property relations in the
form of highly redistributive land reform programmes. Agriculture was thereby
able to provide both a broad basis for industrial growth by making the necessary
contributions (of labour, cheap food) and providing a domestic market for in-
dustrial commodities. Hart (1996) draws attention to a rather different aspect of
the agro-industrial linkages in these East Asian success stories, which highlights
the inter-connections between three crucial sets of issues: land reform, industrial
accumulation and restructuring, and livelihoods diversification.
Since the 1960s, much of the growth of small-scale, labour-intensive industry
in Taiwan, as well as in post-reform China, has been located in rural areas, and
industrial accumulation has effectively benefited from, and been subsidized by,
the population’s broad-based access to land for their subsistence (Hart 1996).
Hart’s own research in northwestern Kwazulu Natal (South Africa), by contrast,
reveals that Taiwanese industrialists who, over the past decade, have invested
directly in the clothing industry in this district, have encountered intense diffi-
culties in recruiting labour. One of the reasons why these garment factories
operate so problematically in South Africa, she argues, is to be found in the
conditions of social reproduction, which in this case primarily turns on lack of
access to land. In sharp contrast with conditions in Taiwan and China, where
subsistence guarantees in the form of broad-based access to land guaranteed
workers’ livelihoods by underwriting the money wage, in South Africa the
workforce has been constituted through a particularly brutal process of land
dispossession (i.e. very unequal property relations).16 In other words, low wages
in rural industries are not backed up by systems of support from household
subsistence production as part of the overall livelihood strategy, as they are in
East Asia. This understanding of agro-industrial linkages and the ‘social wage’ in
turn has major implications for how land reform is understood.
Instead of focusing primarily on small farmers and agriculture, land reform
needs to be understood as a means to create conditions in which people can

15
Moreover, as Hart (1995) argues, the foreign-owned, export-oriented industries located in the
southern coastal provinces of China profit directly from the social investments made during the
communist era, while running these investments down.
16
On the continuing (and increasing) importance of land as social insurance after the dissolution of
the communes in 1983 and the reduction in the role of the state, see Bramall and Jones (2000).

JOAC3_1_2C02 18 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 Introduction: Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights 19

construct livelihoods from a variety of sources, both agricultural and non-

agricultural, in more effective and productive ways. East Asian experience
suggests that land reform capable of supporting multi-livelihoods calls for
access to small plots of land in close proximity to other sources of income and
services. A very small but well-watered piece of land that can support intens-
ive cultivation and is close to other income opportunities is likely to be far
more useful for large numbers of poor families – and particularly women –
than becoming a farm household wherever land happens to become avail-
able through the market. (Hart 1995, 46)
In this kind of diversified livelihood strategy, access to land therefore assumes a
new strategic significance.
In some areas of sub-Saharan Africa, primarily South Africa, historically con-
structed and very unequal land relations have affected the conditions of repro-
duction of many households who pursue diversified livelihoods in which some
income is derived from wages, some from the informal economy and some from
subsistence production for which access to land is needed. As Walker (this issue)
explains, access to land remains critically important in people’s livelihoods, and
is often combined with wage labour and state pensions. Land, she argues, has
value not only for food and market crops, but also for the non-commoditized
resources it offers people, such as housing, firewood, grazing, building and craft
materials and so on.
Yet it is important to underline that these multiple, diversified, spatially ex-
tended livelihood strategies are not peculiar to South Africa. While it is true that
for historical reasons agriculture plays a minor role in the South African national
economy (as Table 1 shows, agriculture now contributes under 4 per cent of
South Africa’s GDP), research findings from other parts of Africa, where agri-
culture retains much greater weight in terms of its contribution to the GDP,
attest to the fact that diversification is proceeding apace across the continent.
Based on detailed survey findings from seven sub-Saharan African countries,
Bryceson (1999) reports a surge in non-agricultural income sources over the
past 15 years as structural adjustment policies have been implemented.17 The
vast majority of households in the surveyed countries have one or more non-
agricultural income source, ‘be it active participation in trade, service provision-
ing or craft work, or more passive receipt of a transfer payment in the form of a
state pension or remittances from relations’ (Bryceson 1999, 11). The state’s
withdrawal from the agricultural sector during the SAPs era has entailed rising
input costs and poor market prospects; this is leading to the relocation of land
and labour away from commercial agriculture (Bryceson 1999). These changes
combined with the rising cash needs of household reproduction, due to the

17
These findings are synthesized from the De-Agrarianisation and Rural Employment (DARE)
Research Programme (Africa-Studiecentrum, Leiden), which includes extensive field research in the
following countries: Congo-Brazzaville, Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, South Africa and
Zimbabwe.

JOAC3_1_2C02 19 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 20 Shahra Razavi

imposition of ‘user fees’ at health centres and schools as well as rising food
prices, have intensified households’ diversification strategies and the proliferation
of income earners within the rural household.
Most of this livelihood diversification is for ‘survival’ rather than ‘accumula-
tion’, which is another way of saying that these households are not meeting
conditions of social reproduction. Importantly though, these are not areas where
households lack access to land. What they lack are the resources to work the
land, and also the institutional and infrastructural support that would enable
them to take advantage of prices for agricultural products (although there are
questions as to whether the terms of trade in a globalized economy are ever
going to enable them to make a living out of selling agricultural commodities).
This then raises the general argument for SSA about what is the role of land as
a site of food production and as a site of income production in households that
are pursuing these multiple, spatially extended livelihood strategies. And what
are the effects as other more powerful interests start alienating this land (for
tourism, for highly commercial forms of agriculture, for dams, for industrial
production) – the predation that is referred to in the Whitehead and Tsikata
contribution?
In the very different political economy of Uzbekistan, where public-sector
employment and wages have collapsed, Kandiyoti documents a dual process of
demonetization and re-agrarianization as the rural population falls back on house-
hold and subsidiary plots for self-subsistence. But, at the same time, it is import-
ant to underline that while in the face of stagnation or collapse of non-farm
employment, land remains (or becomes) critically important for household re-
production, land is not the single most important basis for livelihoods. Nor does
the process of re-agrarianization in Uzbekistan mark a re-turn to the old subsist-
ence farming – state pensions, other social benefits and social assistance continue
to play an important role in people’s livelihoods, and people scramble for a place
in the over-crowded informal sector of trade and services. Kandiyoti is emphatic
that the cry for land in rural Uzbekistan must be understood as the product of a
very specific conjuncture – when rural inequalities in access to land are not
curbed by significant mechanisms of rural out-migration, receipt of migrants’
remittances, or diversification into off-farm employment. Women’s current land
hunger thus encapsulates both a wish to reinstate the terms of their former social
contract with the collective enterprises (which included access to subsidiary plots),
and their despair in the face of the apparent lack of any other alternative.
The second important implication, and indeed question, emerging from the
East Asian experience cited above, concerns the gender sub-text of how the
agrarian question is resolved. If the logic of accumulation and labour mobiliza-
tion in the Asian success stories was based on a patriarchal social structure which
still managed to provide subsistence guarantees in the form of broad-based access
to land – through a highly egalitarian distribution of use rights among, though
not within, households (Hart 1996, 258) – then what is this reading of East Asian
experience saying about women’s likely place in the changes in the links between
agrarian and industrial sectors taking place elsewhere? More specifically, what

JOAC3_1_2C02 20 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 Introduction: Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights 21

are the gender dynamics of these processes – both in terms of women exercising
political pressure for access to land, and in terms of women being able to sustain
that pressure and maintain their own (independent?) access to land? It is to these
questions that we now turn.

LAND TENURE ARRANGEMENTS: INSTITUTIONS,

REFORMS AND CONSTRAINTS
In recent years, increasing emphasis has been placed, by academics and a wide
range of development practitioners, on secure property rights (through gender-
equitable land titling) as a solution to women’s unequal access to land, female
poverty and women’s subordination.18 This emphasis on the importance of land
rights for women raises two sets of issues. First, the diagnosis that the absence of
secure property rights for women is the cause of unequal gendered access to land
is often premised on the assumption that individual legal ownership is an auto-
matically better way of guaranteeing claims to subsistence resources – an as-
sumption that is questioned by several contributions to this special issue.
As is well known, access to land can take different forms, non-alienable indi-
vidual ownership rights being only one possible way (and not a very equitable,
nor necessarily efficient, one) of establishing such access. In post-reform China,
for example, while the collective agricultural enterprises have been gradually
dismantled, the village collectives (or village cooperatives) have retained owner-
ship rights to the land, while they have leased use rights to households, rather
than opting for individual ownership. Individual ownership has in any case not
been supported by rural residents (Summerfield 2002). Should this route be
taken, and full-fledged land markets be developed, many fear that this is likely
to lead to even more marked social inequalities, with politically destabilizing
implications.
In the case of sub-Saharan Africa, Whitehead and Tsikata contend that land
has been historically subject to multiple uses and multiple users, which recog-
nizes the presence of different interests and claims in land vested in different
persons. While individual and family access to land under indigenous tenure has
become more exclusive, in many places these claims fall short of private prop-
erty rights in land. Moreover, it is now widely recognized that individualization
and titling, which were major components of free market modernizing approaches
to rural economic development in many African countries (especially Kenya),
produced highly inequitable outcomes, ‘because those with money, information
and power grabbed land titles’ while the more vulnerable groups experienced a
weakening of their claims. These findings are borne out by studies that have
looked at the specific impacts of registration and titling on women’s land access.
They find overwhelming evidence of women losing access, while male house-
hold heads have strengthened their hold over land by registering their claims on

18
See especially Agarwal (1994) for a scholarly analysis of the gender and land question in South Asia.

JOAC3_1_2C02 21 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 22 Shahra Razavi

land as being ‘ownership’.19 It is in recognition of the huge constraints that

women as individuals would face in purchasing, leasing and cultivating land that
Agarwal (this issue) proposes various forms of collective investment and cultiva-
tion by women, with institutional support from NGOs.
The second question that is raised implicitly by the growing emphasis on the
importance of strengthening women’s land rights (through titling and forms of
private ownership) concerns women’s access to land in indigenous systems of
land tenure. Have indigenous systems of land tenure been uniformly discrimin-
atory towards women, denying them access to land? There is a fairly widespread
understanding, reflected in the contributions by Agarwal and Deere in this special
issue, that indigenous land tenure arrangements in much of South Asia and Latin
America have been constructed on a unitary household model marked by unequal
gender relations which casts the male household head as the breadwinner–
subject–citizen and thus the legitimate claimant of land, while women (along
with children) are subsumed as ‘dependents’ who are, by definition, less-than-
complete subjects or citizens. In traditional family farming in India and Brazil,
therefore, men have appeared as landowners, tenants and leaseholders, while
women have tended to be subsumed under the ubiquitous label of ‘family la-
bourers’ with tenuous claims to the ‘household’ land. The critique that is levelled
at the state, and even at ‘progressive’ political parties and social movements in
India and Brazil by these authors is that they are predisposed to replicate this
male breadwinner–female dependant model through public policy (e.g. Opera-
tion Barga in West Bengal) and in bottom–up land invasions and the setting up of
agrarian reform settlements (e.g. by landless movements).
Whitehead and Tsikata point out the danger of extending analyses and argu-
ments from these rather different socio-economic contexts to sub-Saharan Africa,
where considerable land scarcity is developing in some countries. Sub-Saharan
African women tend to have claims to land independent of their husbands, and
even those through their husbands are much stronger than conventional accounts
imply. Women’s claims to land, however, are not identical to men’s claims,
and have been weakening for complex reasons explored in their paper. The
misrepresentation of women’s land claims as secondary to men’s arises out of a
widespread mis-construction of indigenous concepts that express multiple uses
embedded in social relations (where alienability is not a property of the land–
person relationship). For example, the notion of multiple land claims seems to
have produced the widespread description of land in African tenure systems as
subject to a ‘bundle of rights’; this idea, which was used in the colonial period to
underline the different character of various kinds of land claims, is modelled on
the distinction made in Western jurisprudence between use rights and ownership

19
Nor have processes of land registration and titling and the development of land markets enhanced
agricultural investment and productivity (see sources cited in Whitehead and Tsikata, this issue), even
though secure individual tenure and a land market have been promoted in the belief that they will
lead to higher levels of agricultural investment and productivity, while customary land management
has been perceived as an obstruction to capitalist agriculture.

JOAC3_1_2C02 22 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 Introduction: Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights 23

rights. But the use of this distinction both in colonial times and today is mislead-
ing. Currently, a major contestation is between those who use the term ‘bundle
of rights’ to describe multiple claims in land, and see them as being hierarchically
ordered and gendered (with women having the weaker ‘use rights’, while men
or lineages have the stronger ‘ownership’ or ‘control’ rights), and others who,
while arguing that there are multiple claims, reject the core distinction between
primary and secondary rights and also the idea of a hierarchical ordering of
claims. The latter authors stress instead the negotiated dynamic and fluid nature
of the tenure relations and tenure claims and treat their socially embedded nature
in radically different ways.20
There is, however, no doubt that women are losing out as land scarcity bites,
but how this is happening needs to be fully understood. Discriminatory inherit-
ance laws and poor land access constitute significant constraints on the agricul-
tural operations of some rural women in the region, but elsewhere inability to
get access to land is rarely a major factor constraining women’s agricultural
output and income and thereby a cause of female poverty (Whitehead and
Lockwood 1999; Whitehead 2001). ‘There are a number of areas of Africa where
this is certainly not the case and where although land is not “abundant” the main
constraints in farming and on incomes remain lack of capital to invest in farming
and lack of labour too’ (Whitehead and Tsikata 2001, 16). This is an important
observation to bear in mind.
The three factors highlighted above – women’s relatively strong claims to
land in indigenous African land tenure systems; the gender-inequitable outcomes
of land titling and registration in modernist African states; and the fact that the
main constraints on female farming in the region stem from capital, labour and
marketing constraints, rather than land constraints – underpin Whitehead and
Tsikata’s discomfort with many gender and development policy documents that
still advocate a blanket global policy of ensuring women’s land access through
private property rights and titling, without reference to these African specificities.
Does this mean that public policy in the region should not concern itself with
land tenure arrangements – thereby allowing existing indigenous land tenure
arrangements to evolve at their own pace? Their answer to this question is
clearly and vehemently negative: the rural customary, they argue, cannot be left
to muddle along without widening the gap between men’s and women’s land
access; it is necessary to manage and direct change in order to produce greater
gender justice with respect to resource allocation for rural women. This in fact
constitutes the second pillar of their argument, and the point is forcefully made
because such a laissez-faire position (trust ‘customary law’ and ‘the local’) does
seem to be emerging from policy institutions across the political spectrum (Land
Policy Division of the World Bank, OXFAM-Great Britain, International Institute
for Environment and Development – IIED). The emerging consensus maintains
that the local/indigenous land tenure institutions and arrangements should be

20
See Whitehead and Tsikata (this issue) for references.

JOAC3_1_2C02 23 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 24 Shahra Razavi

left to manage land disputes and land claims on their own, because they can
do the job more cheaply, more flexibly, more effectively, and by provoking less
conflict.

Subsidiarity and Devolution

For policy advocates such as OXFAM and the IIED, and the National Land Forum
in Tanzania (discussed in Tsikata, this issue), subsidiarity and devolution are key
objectives in current land reform policy. Given the history of political abuse and
processes of land alienation and ‘land grabbing’ facilitated by national political
elites, they claim that it is best that decisions on land management and control be
taken at the lowest levels possible, ‘closer to home’ in the words of the Shivji
Commission in Tanzania. ‘The local’ is thus seen as a site of resistance against the
state (and international capital). This approach fits their general support for par-
ticipation, building of local capacities, and local-level democracy. But there is
very little discussion by these groups as to how the proposed local level systems
might work in practice, including their capacity to deliver more equitable (and
especially gender-equitable) resource allocation. The main problem, as Whitehead
and Tsikata remind us, is that women have too little political voice at all the
decision-making levels that are implied by the land question: not only within
formal law and government, but also within local level management systems and
civil society itself.
Ironically, some of the social movements that are struggling for land redistri-
bution at the local level are often more aware of the importance of having the
weight of the federal government behind them, and also more attentive to the
risks and dangers of local government capture by powerful vested interests. One
of the initiatives of the government of Fernando Enrique Cardoso in Brazil has
been to decentralize agrarian reform, devolving greater responsibility for its plan-
ning and execution to state and local governments. But there has been very little
follow-up to this initiative, primarily because of the resistance of the rural social
movements to decentralization (Deere and León 1999). The rural social move-
ments were reportedly worried that the federal government would abdicate re-
sponsibility for leading the cause of agrarian reform, and that the power of
landlords at the local level would be sufficient to stop any significant redistribu-
tion of land from taking place if the initiative was left to the state and local
governments (Deere and León 1999).
In other contexts there is serious apprehension about the place that is going to
be given to ‘culture’ and ‘traditional authorities’ in rural local government. This
question emerges forcefully from Walker’s account of the political dynamics
surrounding land reform at The Gorge in KwaZulu Natal. At the heart of this
land redistribution project there has been an ambiguity about the residents’ status
as beneficiaries of the project in relation to the claims of the neighbouring Tribal
Authority which regards the land and the people on it as its domain. This ambi-
guity is in fact rooted in ANC’s attempts since 1994 to accommodate some of
the demands of IFP (Inkatha Freedom Party), which is the ruling party in KwaZulu

JOAC3_1_2C02 24 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 Introduction: Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights 25

Natal, on the place of traditional authorities in rural local government. Given the
fact that the traditionalism that is espoused by IFP and many of its adherents in
the Tribal Authorities is deeply patriarchal, Walker (1994, this issue) maintains
that these political manoeuvrings have effectively blunted ANC’s commitments
to gender equity in rural affairs. Whitehead and Tsikata voice similar concerns
about the political dynamics that are being unleashed by the return to ‘customary
law’, the revival of ‘traditional’ authorities and the renewing of chieftaincy in
many parts of SSA – warning that these trends could have highly disempowering
implications for rural African women and their claims on resources.
Questions regarding traditional authorities aside, there are many warnings
across the literature that ‘the local’ is a site of unequal rural social relations, with
crucial implications for women. And even more problematically, stark inequal-
ities and grave injustices can exist without being openly contested by those who
are the victims. This last point, which has been the subject of on-going feminist
debate (Kandiyoti 1988, 1998), is brought out in Walker’s contribution to this
special issue, where she looks at women’s involvement in the three land reform
projects in KwaZulu Natal. The demand-driven nature of the South African land
reform programme, and the fact that officials from the Department of Land
Affairs (DLA) were working with already-constituted social groups and existing
power relations between men and women, ensured that initially very little atten-
tion was paid to gender equity – in the words of one DLA official ‘it (gender
equity) did not even emerge as an issue’. As Agarwal (this issue) notes in re-
sponse to those who argue that policy priorities should be identified on the basis
of expressed wants, in situations of deprivation people often adapt their prefer-
ences and felt needs to what they see as attainable. Women, in particular, may be
so thoroughly subordinated that they are unable to recognize any injustice in the
prevailing order. Even though such a statement edges disturbingly close to no-
tions of ‘false consciousness’, it has been an indispensable component in feminist
thought (Phillips 2002).
On the positive side though, what we see from Walker’s account is that the
constitutional commitments to gender equity in land reform have created some
space and provided some institutional mechanisms for gender issues to be brought
in by the DLA – though unevenly across the three land reform projects, depend-
ing on how active DLA staff have been around gender issues, as well as the
presence of external agencies such as land rights NGOs. This seems to have
encouraged community debate on the subject, even though the results to date are
modest. Women’s presence on land reform committees, which is considered as
DLA’s most tangible achievement in relation to women’s land rights, is itself not
a guarantee that women’s specific concerns and demands will necessarily be
voiced. The fear of ridicule for stepping outside their socially designated roles is
cited as one of the main reasons why women committee members have kept
a low profile. Yet from informal discussions it is clear that women recognize
their vulnerabilities in relation to their husbands, and are interested in exploring
ways in which their rights and interests can be made more secure (more on this
further below). But as Walker rightly warns, ‘social process’ work is difficult,

JOAC3_1_2C02 25 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 26 Shahra Razavi

time-consuming and expensive, and yet essential if the DLA’s gender policy is to
serve more than a largely rhetorical function.
In Brazil, for example, even though constitutional guarantees of women’s
land rights (in 1988) were combined with pressure from below in the form of
women’s active involvement in dynamic rural unions and in the nascent landless
movement to create what would appear to be highly propitious circumstances
for the substantiation of women’s land rights, the outcomes have been far from
automatic. By the mid-1990s, rural Brazilian women constituted what is, by
regional standards at least, a very modest proportion (12.6 per cent) of the bene-
ficiaries of agrarian reform. Deere identifies a number of factors to explain why
it took so long (almost 12 years) for organized rural women to even demand
effective recognition of their land rights, and even longer for these voiced de-
mands to find meaningful representation in the rural social movements.
Even if women’s demands are being promoted by powerful and dynamic
social movements, having the weight of the state behind the agenda for gender
justice is a sine qua non for its realization. The central instrument for the protec-
tion of rights has been, and must remain, the state (Molyneux and Razavi 2002).
Hence the role of the state in raising such issues and providing the institutional
mechanisms and macroeconomic and statutory frameworks for their realization
is highly significant. Whether states advance or curtail women’s rights cannot, of
course, be explained in terms of any single variable, although democratic institu-
tions and procedures are generally assumed to allow greater voice and presence
to social forces pressing for reform (Molyneux and Razavi 2002), assuming that
democratic processes and institutions are ‘thick’, and that they adequately engage
with issues of gender equity.21

Statutory Interventions
There are plenty of examples across this special issue documenting both the
considerable progress that was made throughout the 1980s and 1990s in making
formal laws more gender-equitable (e.g. Hindu and Muslim laws pertaining
to land in India, gender-egalitarian constitutional principles in Brazil and South
Africa, and so on), as well as evidence of repeated failures in making these
statutory interventions ‘real’. The reasons for failure are legion – from budgetary
constraints arising from government fiscal discipline, to administrative and insti-
tutional weaknesses within government in the management of gender policy,
and weak political accountability for gender policy within parliament and/or
civil society. The legal domain itself, with its implicit gender-biased assumptions
and discourses, such as the unencumbered individual of contract theory and the
notion of individual rights, and its inaccessible institutions and mechanisms, has
not been a comfortable terrain for women to operate within. There are then

21
Peter Evans (2002) makes the distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ democratic processes; the
former refers to having leadership succession determined by a regular electoral process, while the
latter means having continuous deliberative involvement of the citizenry in the setting of economic
and social policies and priorities.

JOAC3_1_2C02 26 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 Introduction: Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights 27

many deep-seated reasons why gender-progressive laws do not deliver gender

justice when they intersect with decision-making processes and rural (or urban,
for that matter) power relations.
The fundamental question, however, as Tsikata puts it, is whether these diffi-
culties in implementation have rendered statutory law, whatever its purpose and
character, totally pointless? In other words, is there any purpose to be served by
legislation? The answer that seems to be emerging from this special issue to the
last question is a qualified yes. Yes, because it sets a benchmark against which
progress can be measured; and because it provides discursive resources that can
be capitalized upon by rural women and their advocates to establish their access
to material resources, be it through courts or through informal processes of
dispute settlement. But a qualified yes, because it is one among many resources
that women will bring to their daily struggles for access to resources, in what is
arguably a messy reality wherein individuals use different dispute settlement fora
and deploy different arguments (whether grounded in ‘customary’ or ‘modern-
ist’ principles), whichever is to their advantage. Ultimately, what determines
outcome is to a considerable degree the power relations at stake, within an
overall context of inequality.

JOINT OR INDIVIDUAL TITLES? RETHINKING

THE AGRARIAN HOUSEHOLD
Where land titling is an appropriate way of improving women’s land access,
there is little consensus among the contributors to this special issue as to whether
individual titles or joint titles would serve women’s interests better. For Agarwal,
joint titles (in the Indian context, at least) present problems: it makes it difficult
for women to gain control over the produce, to bequeath the land as they want,
and to claim their share in case of marital conflict. Individual titles provide
women with more flexibility in pursuing their own agendas. However, given
some of the problems that resource-strained women smallholders with indi-
vidual titles might confront – for example, their lack of investible funds, and the
difficulties of investing in capital equipment if the farm is small – for Agarwal,
the optimum institutional arrangement would be some collective form of invest-
ment and cultivation that would bring women smallholders together, thereby
cutting across households (rather than being based on the household unit itself ).
Individual titles for women thus need to be pursued in tandem with institutional
innovations to forge new forms of collective investment and cultivation that
reduce the risks of individual enterprise for women, and yet provide mechanisms
for their greater independence and autonomy from male-dominated households.
Such institutional innovations are premised on the prior existence of active and
well-funded NGOs that can act as facilitators.
Reflecting on the South African context, where the first phase of land reform
has failed to deliver individual rights to women because the land reform pro-
gramme has been based, implicitly at least, on a model of a relatively homogene-
ous community made up of stable and implicitly egalitarian households, Walker

JOAC3_1_2C02 27 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 28 Shahra Razavi

admits that even where women have been listed as independent household heads
and as beneficiaries in their own right, their access to land has been mediated
overwhelmingly through their membership in patriarchal households. Neverthe-
less, rather than endorsing individual rights as the solution (which is a com-
ponent of the new land reform policy, ‘Land Redistribution for Agricultural
Development’ or LRAD, issued in November 2000), she thinks that there needs
to be deeper appreciation of the importance of household membership in poor
women’s lives, and thus the importance of ensuring women’s rights to house-
hold resources. Had the LRAD framework, with its emphasis on individual
rights, been in place from the start of the land reform programme, she argues,
very few, if any, of the women in the present beneficiary communities would
have been able to access land through it – they are simply too poor, too isolated
and too dependent on male authority to be able to establish individual rights to
land. Moreover, many women beneficiaries endorse the household model im-
plicit in DLA’s work, and some have struggled very hard to secure household
interests. While a minority seemed interested in the idea of individual titles, de-
linked from that of their husbands or families, few saw this as the solution to
their problems. They were more interested in mechanisms that would secure and
extend their rights to household resources (through joint titles, and copies of title
deeds). Moreover, given the weak presence and patchy coverage of land rights
NGOs in KwaZulu Natal, it is rather difficult to imagine that they would be able
to provide, on a sufficiently large scale, the kind of institutional experimentation
suggested by Agarwal.
It is clear from the above statements that the question about joint or individual
titles is in fact not as straightforward as it appears. Implicitly, it is a question
about the conceptualization of conjugal relations and the forces that bind agrarian
households together. The two positions, by Agarwal and Walker, in fact bring
to the fore some of the tensions within the current, second-generation feminist
(F2) conceptualizations of the household, where the first-generation feminist
critique (F1) has established, in both theoretical and empirical terms, serious
flaws in the previously dominant unified household paradigm.22 While most
feminists would agree that households are sites of struggle and inequality (as per
F1), there is currently far less agreement as to how the given inequalities and
tensions, as well as common interests and cooperative behaviour, should be
understood and conceptualized. Do conflictual and bargaining models sufficiently
capture the common interests that all household members have in the overall
economic success of their households? What makes women and junior men stay
inside the patriarchal household, even though they are allocated fewer resources
and enjoy less leisure time? Is it really pure despotism on the part of the male
household head, and ‘false consciousness’ on the part of the junior household
members, that binds the household together (Whitehead and Kabeer 2001)?

22
My distinction between first-generation and second-generation feminist conceptualizations of the
household should not be confused with the distinction between first wave and second wave feminism
used historically.

JOAC3_1_2C02 28 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 Introduction: Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights 29

These are not questions to which any definitive answers can be given. But
there are powerful arguments for seeing households as ‘maximizing a range of
utilities – these might include capacity for diversification, flexibility in the case of
agro-climatic shocks, other kinds of risk spreading (against illness and death, for
example), long term investments, social reproduction and so on and so forth’
(Whitehead 2001, 19). It is within this broader understanding of households and
their positioning within the social economy that the ‘woman and land’ question
needs to be placed. In some contexts and for some groups of women, mech-
anisms that secure and extend women’s rights to household land can provide
appropriate forms of access and entitlement, yet without having to venture down
the risky path of individual rights where rural power relations are stacked against
them. In other contexts, where rural class structures and power relations are less
menacing, it may be more feasible to experiment with alternative institutional
arrangements that require (and enhance) women’s greater autonomy from male-
dominated households.

GENDER AND LAND: TOWARDS A MORE CONTEXTUALIZED

ANALYSIS
This special issue highlights the importance of posing the gender and land ques-
tion within its broader context. This in turn requires moving beyond the ‘critical
assumption that gender power relations at the local level are embedded in con-
jugal intra-household relations alone’ (Sen 1999, 691). As the contributions to this
special issue make clear, the structures of power that women confront operate at
multiple levels (global, national, local) and within diverse institutional arenas
(communities, social movements, markets, states, kingroups, households and so
on).
The special issue has discussed how the deflationary macroeconomic policies
and processes associated with economic liberalization are impacting on rural
livelihoods and agrarian transitions differently in diverse contexts and has em-
phasized the gender specificities of these impacts. The deceleration of more for-
mal forms of employment is accompanied by the diversification of household
livelihoods, and the intensification of women’s unpaid and casual labour in agri-
culture and the informal sector. These are the stark effects at the level of indi-
vidual well-being of the fiscal crisis of the nation state and its retreat from
development and welfare provision, as well as the imperatives of flexible accu-
mulation and global competition (Hart 1996, 269). In this context the land ques-
tion has taken on a new urgency and needs to be posed in a new light. Land
reform needs to be understood as a means to create conditions in which people
can construct livelihoods from a variety of sources, both agricultural and non-
agricultural, in more effective and productive ways. Given women’s centrality to
these diversified livelihood strategies, as well as their increasing political agency
(thanks to processes of democratization which have entailed some engagement,
though uneven, with issues of gender equity), their interests in land are more
politicized today than they were two decades ago.

JOAC3_1_2C02 29 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 30 Shahra Razavi

And yet, while the trends towards democratization have revitalized the na-
tional debate on agrarian reform in a number of countries, and provided greater
voice to women’s advocates, the dominant anti-state rhetoric does not bode well
for women, nor are there any reasons to believe that, in such a climate, processes
of devolution and decentralization will necessarily enhance equity and gender
justice in access to resources. These trends raise many urgent questions about
power configurations at the local level, and the political and institutional obs-
tacles to ensuring greater gender equity in access to resources, including land.
Finally, several contributors to this special issue emphasize the importance of
taking seriously the contextual and institutional specificities that shape women’s
access to resources, including land. There are numerous warnings about the
dangers of ‘downloading’ all-purpose gender and development (GAD) analytical
frameworks and blindly reproducing policy prescriptions developed with other
contexts in mind. This de-contextualized approach to ‘doing gender’ is in fact
part of a broader problem that currently afflicts gender policy, as GAD tool kits,
planning modules and institutional blueprints are carelessly replicated across
diverse contexts. While there may be some vague benefits to institutional learn-
ing, the dangers of ‘institutional monocropping’23 (Evans 2002) in the field of
gender and development need to be taken far more seriously.

REFERENCES
Agarwal, B., 1994. A Field of One’s Own. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Amin, S., 1972. ‘Underdevelopment and Dependence in Black Africa – Origins and
Contemporary Forms’. The Journal of Modern African Studies, 10 (4): 503–24.
Binswanger, Hans, 1989. The Policy Response of Agriculture. Report No. 14355. Washing-
ton, DC: World Bank.
Blackden, M. and C. Bhanu, 1999. ‘Gender, Growth and Poverty Reduction: Special
Programme for Assistance to Africa’. Status Report on Poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.
Washington, DC: World Bank.
Bramall, C., 2000. Sources of Chinese Economic Growth: 1978–1996. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Bramall, C. and M.E. Jones, 2000. ‘The Fate of the Chinese Peasantry Since 1978’. In
Disappearing Peasantries? Rural Labour in Africa, Asia and Latin America, eds D. Bryceson,
C. Kay and J. Mooij, 262–78. London: ITDG.
Bryceson, D.F., 1993. Liberalizing Tanzania’s Food Trade: Public and Private Faces of Urban
Marketing Policy 1939–1988. Geneva: UNRISD.
Bryceson, D.F., 1999. ‘Sub-Saharan Africa Betwixt and Between: Rural Livelihood Prac-
tices and Policies’. ASC Working Paper 43. Leiden: Africa-Studiecentrum.
Byres, T.J., forthcoming. ‘Structural Change, the Agrarian Question, and the Possible
Impact of Globalization’. In Globalization, Structural Change and Income Distribution, eds
C.P. Chandrasekhar and J. Ghosh. Delhi: Tulika.

23
Evans defines ‘institutional monocropping’ as the imposition of blueprints based on idealized
versions of Anglo-American institutions, whose applicability is presumed to transcend national cul-
tures and circumstances.

JOAC3_1_2C02 30 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 Introduction: Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights 31

Consumer Unity and Trust Society (CUTS), 1999. ‘Conditions Necessary for the Liber-
alisation of Trade and Investment to Reduce Poverty’. Final Report to DFID.
Deere, C.D. and M. León, 1999. ‘Towards a Gendered Analysis of the Brazilian Agrarian
Reform’. Occasional Paper No. 16. Storrs/Amherst: Center for Latin American Studies.
Deininger, K. and P. Olinto, 2000. ‘Why Liberalization Alone has not Improved Agricul-
tural Productivity in Zambia: The Role of Asset Ownership and Working Capital
Constraints’. Working Paper 2302. Washington, DC: World Bank.
Ellis, F., 1998. ‘Household Strategies and Rural Livelihood Diversification’. Journal of
Development Studies, 35 (1): 1–38.
Elson, D., 2002. ‘Gender Justice, Human Rights and Neo-liberal Economic Policies’. In
Gender Justice, Development, and Rights, eds M. Molyneux and S. Razavi, 78–114.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Elson, D. and N. Cagatay, 2000. ‘The Social Content of Macroeconomic Policies’. World
Development, 28 (7): 1347–64.
Evans, P., 2002. ‘Beyond “Institutional Monocropping”: Institutions, Capabilities, and
Deliberative Development’. Berkeley, CA: University of California, mimeo.
Gibbon, P., ed., 1995. Liberalised Development in Tanzania: Studies on Accumulation Pro-
cesses and Local Institutions. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikaninstitutet.
Harriss, B., 1990. ‘The Intra-family Distribution of Hunger in South Asia’. In The Polit-
ical Economy of Hunger: Volume 1, Entitlement and Well-being, eds J. Drèze and A. Sen,
351–424. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hart, G., 1994. ‘The Dynamics of Diversification in an Asian Rice Region’. In Develop-
ment or Deterioration?: Work in Rural Asia, eds B. Koppel, J. Hawking and W. James,
47–71. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner.
Hart, G., 1995. ‘Clothes for Next to Nothing: Rethinking Global Competition’. South
African Labour Bulletin, 9 (6): 41–7.
Hart, G., 1996. ‘The Agrarian Question and Industrial Dispersal in South Africa:
Agro-industrial Linkages through Asian Lenses’. Journal of Peasant Studies, 23 (2/3):
245–77.
Hart, G., 2001. Reworking Apartheid Legacies: Global Competition, Gender, and Social Wages
in South Africa, 1980–2000. Geneva: UNRISD, mimeo.
Kandiyoti, D., 1988. ‘Bargaining with Patriarchy’. Gender and Society, 2 (3): 274–90.
Kandiyoti, D., 1998. ‘Gender, Power and Contestation: Rethinking Bargaining with
Patriarchy’. In Feminist Visions of Development, eds C. Jackson and R. Pearson, 135–51.
London: Routledge.
Kay, C., 2001. Asia’s and Latin America’s Development in Comparative Perspective: Landlords,
Peasants, and Industrialization. The Hague: Institute of Social Studies.
Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries (MAFF), 1999. Strategies for Increased Food
Security and Rural Incomes in the Isolated Areas of Zambia. Lusaka: Zambia.
Mkandawire, T. and C.C. Soludo, 2000. Our Continent, Our Future: African Perspectives on
Structural Adjustment. Dakar/Ottawa/Asmara: CODESRIA/IDRC/Africa World Press.
Molyneux, M. and S. Razavi, 2002. ‘Introduction’. Gender Justice, Development and Rights,
eds M. Molyneux and S. Razavi, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Oxfam/IDS, 1999. ‘Liberalisation and Poverty: Zambia Case Study’. Report to DFID.
Phillips, A., 2002. ‘Multiculturalism, Universalism, and the Claims of Democracy’. In
Gender Justice, Development, and Rights, eds M. Molyneux and S. Razavi, 115–38.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pomfret, R., 2000. ‘Agrarian Reform in Uzbekistan: Why Has the Chinese Model Failed
to Deliver?’ Economic Development and Cultural Change, 48 (2): 269–84.

JOAC3_1_2C02 31 12/17/02, 11:57 AM

 32 Shahra Razavi

Razavi, Shahra and Carol Miller, 1995. ‘From WID to GAD: Conceptual Shifts in the
Women and Development Discourse’. Occasional Paper No. 1. Geneva: UNRISD.
Saith, R. and B. Harriss-White, 1999. ‘The Gender Sensitivity of Well-being Indicators’.
Development and Change, 30 (3): 465 –97.
Sen, G., 1999. ‘Engendering Poverty Alleviation: Challenges and Opportunities’. Develop-
ment and Change, 30 (3): 685 –92.
Summerfield, G., 2002. Gender and Agrarian Reform in China. Geneva: UNRISD, mimeo.
Udry, A., J. Hoddinott, H. Alderman and L. Haddad, 1995. ‘Gender Differentials in
Farm Productivity: Implications for Household Efficiency and Agricultural Policy’.
Food Policy, 20 (5): 407–23.
UNCTAD, 1999. Trade and Development Report. New York/Geneva: United Nations.
UNCTAD, 1998. Trade and Development Report. New York/Geneva: United Nations.
Venkateshwarlu, D. and L. Da Corta, 2001. ‘Transformations in the Age and Gender of
Unfree Workers on Hybrid Cotton Seed Farms in Andhra Pradesh’. Journal of Peasant
Studies, 28 (3): 1–36.
Walker, C., 1994. ‘Women, “Tradition” and Reconstruction’. Review of African Political
Economy, 61: 347–58.
Weisbrot, M., D. Baker, R. Naiman and G. Neta, 2000. Growth May Be Good for the Poor
– But are IMF and World Bank Policies Good for Growth: A Closer Look at World Bank’s
Most Recent Defense of Its Policies. Washington, DC: Centre for Economic and Policy
Research.
Winters, L.A., 2000. Trade, Trade Policy and Poverty: What are the Links? Background
Study for World Bank’s World Development Report 2000/01.
Whitehead, A., 2001. ‘Trade, Trade Liberalisation and Rural Poverty in Low-Income
Africa: A Gendered Account’. Background Paper for the UNCTAD 2001 Least
Developed Countries Report. Sussex, mimeo.
Whitehead, A. and N. Kabeer, 2001. ‘Living with Uncertainty: Gender, Livelihoods and
Pro-Poor Growth in Rural Sub-Saharan Africa’. IDS Working Paper 134. Brighton:
Institute of Development Studies.
Whitehead, A. and M. Lockwood, 1999. ‘Gender in the World Bank’s Poverty Assess-
ments: Six Case Studies from Sub-Saharan Africa’. Discussion Paper 99. Geneva:
UNRISD.
Whitehead, A. and D. Tsikata, 2001. ‘Policy Discourses on Women’s Land Rights in Sub-
Saharan Africa’. Geneva: UNRISD, mimeo.
Wold, B., 1997. Supply Response in a Gender Perspective: The Case of Structural Adjustment
in Zambia. Oslo: Statistics Norway and Lusaka: Zambian Central Statistical Office.
World Bank, 1989. Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth. Washington,
DC: World Bank.

JOAC3_1_2C02 32 12/17/02, 11:57 AM