Can the Law Secure Women's Rights to Land in Africa? Revisiting Tensions Between Culture and Land Commercialization
Loading...
Date
2014
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Feminist Economics
Abstract
This contribution is concerned with the challenges of securing women’s rights
to land in Africa in the context of contemporary land deals through a discussion
of three distinct but interrelated problems in the framing of women’s land
rights discourses. First, this study discusses the interface between rights and
“custom” to highlight the inherent distortions of African customary law. Second,
it argues that liberal formulations of the law are limited by a set of assumptions
regarding women’s position in the political economy. And third, this discussion
discursively assesses the debates in the literature regarding the efficacy of law
in protecting women’s rights to land. The discussion proceeds from a critique
of two approaches to promoting gender equity in land tenure systems: the
institutional approach, which deals with women’s formal land rights; and the
political economy approach, which deals with the structural nature of women’s
traditional relations to land.
Description
Keywords
Women, Customary law, Commercialization, Political economy, Justice, Land
Citation
Lyn Ossome (2014) Can the Law Secure Women's Rights to Land in Africa? Revisiting Tensions Between Culture and Land Commercialization, Feminist Economics, 20:1, 155-177, DOI: 10.1080/13545701.2013.876506