‘A good wife stays home’: gendered negotiations over state agricultural programmes,upland Vietnam

Rural and livelihood studies, alongside development organisations, are stressing the importance of gender awareness in debates over food security, food crises and land tenure. Yet, within the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, these gender dynamics are frequently disregarded. In Vietnam, rice is intimately linked to the country's food security. Over the last decade, rice export levels, production methods, and local and global market prices have remained constant preoccupations for governmental and development agencies. Steadfast official approval for agricultural technologies and intensification has seen the domestic growth and importation of hybrid varieties of rice and maize seeds. Yet, the impacts of these technologies on upland ethnic minority rice producers and consumers in Vietnam have been overlooked. For these women and men, such as Hmong and Yao farmers, food security is a daily concern for their near-subsistence livelihoods. While strongly encouraged to grow these new seeds, insufficient research has examined the social realities and experiences of these upland minority groups. Moreover, how such agrarian policies and practices are being implicated in reconfiguring gender roles, relations and identities through transformations to individual and household livelihoods has been ignored. In this article, we focus on the gendered consequences of the government's hybrid rice programme for upland farmers. We reveal recent impacts on family relations, including rising intergenerational tensions across genders, and shifting responsibilities and new negotiations between young spouses. These dynamics are further complicated by household economic status, as household members access specific opportunities available to them to improve everyday food security.     

Land Tenure Insecurity and Inequality in Nicaragua

This article uses empirical data from a case study in rural Nicaragua to demonstrate the need for a conceptualization of tenure security as seen from the perspective of the landholder. A large group of farmers in the case study area perceive their tenure situation as being insecure despite the fact that they possess a legal title to their land. The article argues that more attention must be paid to aspects such as inequalities of wealth and power, lack of enforcement and lack of impartiality on the part of the formal institutions when addressing tenure security in an institutionally unstable setting, such as that found in Nicaragua. The article contributes to the ongoing discussion by arguing that future research on how to increase rural land tenure security should explore the concept of tenure security as experienced by farmers.     

Borrowing of Land,Security of Tenure and Sustainable Land Use in Burkina Faso

Lack of formal security of land tenure is often cited as a constraint for participatory land management programmes which try to motivate African farmers to grow trees and to realize other improvements in their fields in order to control soil erosion. According to this approach, the borrowing of land would represent an insecure form of land tenure hindering sustainable land use. However, on the basis of a case study in Burkina Faso, this article demonstrates that this is not necessarily so: borrowing arrangements may play a part in avoiding local overload of the carrying capacity and in an efficient distribution of village lands among the farming units. Furthermore, borrowing does not hinder some major intensification techniques of land use which are currently being applied in Burkina Faso. Legal interventions which aim to increase security of tenure and to create favourable conditions for sustainable land use may in fact have the opposite effect.     

Land titling and poverty reduction in Southeast Asia: realising markets or realising rights?∗

AusAID has supported land titling projects in Southeast Asia with the World Bank for over two decades. These involve the first-time issuance of a land title in cases where the ownership rights of current occupiers are largely assured. Reflecting neoliberal thinking on private property rights and development, the rationale is that titling builds land markets and increases tenure security, investment and access to institutional credit. However, international research indicates that land titling can be neither sufficient or necessary to deliver such benefits and, under some circumstances, can harm poor landholders’ wellbeing. In this respect, attention is paid to political factors in addition to property rights per se which influence their tenure security. It is argued that the value which neoliberalism places on the exclusivity of ownership of land, to enable its efficient use and allocation, can be in conflict with the importance to poor people of secure access and use rights. If AusAID is to fully commit to poverty reduction goals, then there will need to be more attention paid to the social justice dimensions of land distribution in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.     

Post‐Conflict Ambon: Forced Migration and the Ethno‐Territorial Effects of Customary Tenure

In post‐conflict contexts characterized by large‐scale migration and increasing levels of legal pluralism, customary land tenure risks being deployed as a tool of ethno‐territorialization in which displaced communities are denied return and secure land rights. This thesis will be illustrated through a case study of the Indonesian island of Ambon where a recognition of customary tenure — also called adat — was initiated in 2005 at the end of a high‐intensity conflict between Christians and Muslims. Although a system of land tenure providing multiple forms of social security for the indigenous in‐group, adat in Ambon also constitutes an arena of power in which populations considered as non‐indigenous to a fixed historical territory are pushed into an inferior legal position. The legal registration of customary tenure therefore tends to be deployed to settle long‐standing land contests with a growing migrant community, hereby legally enforcing some of the forced expulsions that were brought about by the recent communal violence.     

Land Policy and Farming Practices in Laos

The government of Laos has identified the eradication of poverty as a priority. Given the primarily agricultural character of the country, it has selected land reform as a core policy to reach this goal. The policy has two major aims: to increase land tenure security in order to encourage farmer involvement in intensive farming, and to eliminate slash‐and‐burn agriculture to protect the environment in a country still rich in forest resources. State intervention takes the form of land allocation, a process which combines the protection of some areas of village land with the formal recognition of private ownership in authorized farming areas. In a country with different types of geography, the effects of the policy are variable, but the research presented in this article demonstrates that the land laws have shortcomings which allow for differing interpretations depending on the local social relationships. Since local specificities are not taken into account, the reform is proving counterproductive for both forest protection and agricultural modernization, as well as having a negative social impact by marginalizing the poorest farmers.     

Land as fictitious commodity: the continuing evolution of women's land rights in Uganda

In sub-Saharan Africa, colonial influences have altered traditional practices as a way to manage that which Polanyi labeled as ‘fictitious commodities’ of land, labor, and money. Land has now become a highly marketable commodity and an intrinsic part of the global economy. Over the past century, Uganda's land rights have evolved from communal rights to that of male-dominated, individual ownership practices that have excluded women. Despite constitutional provisions, which confer title of both a deceased husband's property rights and equal rights to property within a marriage to a wife, postcolonial patriarchal tradition prevails. This article examines historical changes in land rights in Uganda and discusses the impact of shifts in land rights from communal ownership to individual tenure, altering power structures and attempting to create marketable land title. The Ugandan women's movement's opposition to policies and implementation of laws that exclude women has been unable to facilitate the required changes in unbiased access to land rights, despite apparent victories in revisions to the letter of the law. Situated within contemporary interpretations of tradition and pressures of market demand, this article shows that women's access to landownership and use are restricted by misinterpretation of traditional law and a lack of enforcement of contemporary legal rights. To illustrate the impact of a lack of access to land, this article examines an empirical case study of widowed subsistence farmers in southern Uganda. Women in Uganda continue to lose ground, quite literally, decreasing the possibility of gender equity in terms of land.     

Land Tenure, Archaeology, and the Ancestral Pueblo Social Landscape

Archaeology relies upon evidence of past human modification of the natural landscape in order to infer past human social dynamics on the site, local, and regional levels. Given the inferential linkages between past landscape use and social relationships, archaeology can benefit from an approach that more explicitly delineates relationships between systems of land use and land tenure, the social means through which people define and assert land use rights. This research outlines a set of methods for modeling prehistoric land tenure systems and developing a middle range theory of land tenure relationships that may assist archaeologists in their investigations of prehistoric resource access systems. Land tenure systems are complex risk-buffering strategies that are conditioned by the labor invested in food production, the size of groups holding direct access to productive lands and resources, and the temporal duration of land access rights. The role of these variables is supported by cross-cultural data from a worldwide sample of food-producing societies. The land tenure model is applied to data from the prehistoric Southwest to help explain local and regional changes in food production, settlement size, and community organization in southwest Colorado between 900 and 1300 A.D.     

陕西省农村土地流转迟缓的供求影响因素与机制探析

农村土地流转长期受到决策者的鼓励,但我国农村土地使用权流转率一直偏低,西部地区尤其如此。本文试图以陕西省为例,通过问卷调查和访谈,分析农地社会保障功能等因素影响农地使用权流转率的作用机制;并从供给和需求两个方面,分析了经济落后地区农村土地使用权流转率偏低的原因。研究结果表明,农地流转受到现行的以提供社会保障为基本目的的农地制度的约束,任何旨在提高农地流转率的改革措施,都必须考虑现行农地制度的社会保障功能和地区差异,实行因地制宜的农地流转制度。     

Family Property and the Limits of Intervention: The Article 27 Reforms and the PROCEDE Programme in Mexico

In the 1990s the Mexican peasants witnessed the introduction of a new Agrarian Law and the implementation of the land regularization programme, PROCEDE. In this article it is demonstrated that the privatization of previously communally held ejido land did not lead to the promised dynamic land market, nor to an increase in agricultural productivity. On the basis of an in–depth study of land tenure practices in the ejido La Canoa in Western Mexico, it is shown that the changes of 1992 did not address the main problems of peasant agriculture. The new Agrarian Law legalized practices which, although illegal, had already become quite common in ejidos throughout Mexico. In addition, it is argued that legal security does not necessarily reside in official registration by the state, but can also be based on local recognition of land rights. The main argument of the article is that property consists of complex sets of claims, rights and obligations that cannot be manipulated by forms of state intervention that reduce land tenure predicaments to technical problems.     

Social Capital and Community Strategies: Neighbourhood Development in Guatemala City

This article uses a social capital framework to analyse the strategies employed by two low–income communities in Guatemala City to improve their physical and social environment. The case studies provide examples of poor communities, without access to any form of insurance or welfare benefits, struggling to achieve neighbourhood development. They also demonstrate the way in which strategies can be defined by the issue of land tenure. Key strategies for development were found to be mobilization through community organization, informal links (including clientelistic relations) with powerful groups, and protest. The author concludes that social capital (within communities and between stakeholders) and some degree of security (land tenure) are critical ingredients for communities to develop effective strategies for neighbourhood development with other stakeholders.     

To sexually perform or protect: masculine identity construction and perceptions of women's sexuality on a university campus in the Midwestern USA

Modern universities in the USA are places of recreation and leisure in addition to institutional spaces of education. Often characterized by alcohol-fueled socializing and sexualized interaction, university social life rivals the formal curriculum, and hooking up – or recreational sexual interaction outside of committed relationships – has become a defining feature. This article examines the spatiality of sexual and gender identities among heterosexual men at a 4-year residential university located in the Midwestern USA. Drawing on in-depth and focus group data, the article examines how men from contrasting peer cultures construct masculine identities in relation to casual sex and perceptions of women's sexuality. Particular attention is paid to how men negotiate senses of self in relation to the sexual practices, processes, and identities played out in the dominant party scene on campus.     

Gender,Traditional Authority,and the Politics of Rural Reform in South Africa

The new South African Constitution, together with later policies and legislation, affirm a commitment to gender rights that is incompatible with the formal recognition afforded to unelected traditional authorities. This contradiction is particularly evident in the case of land reform in many rural areas, where women’s right of access to land is denied through the practice of customary law. This article illustrates the ways in which these constitutional contradictions play out with particular intensity in the ‘former homelands’ through the example of a conflict over land use in Buffelspruit, Mpumalanga province. There, a number of women who had been granted informal access to communal land for the purposes of subsistence cultivation had their rights revoked by the traditional authority. Despite desperate protests, they continue to be marginalized in terms of access to land, while their male counterparts appropriate communal land for commercial farming and cattle grazing. Drawing on this protest, we argue that current South African practice in relation to the pressing issue of gender equity in land reform represents a politics of accommodation and evasion that tends to reinforce gender biases in rural development, and in so doing, undermines the prospects for genuinely radical transformation of the instituted geographies and institutionalized practices bequeathed by the apartheid regime.     

Private Provision after Public Neglect: Bending Irrigation Markets in North Bihar

Research in North-East Bihar shows public sector irrigation management to be embodied within the prevailing cultural structures of the region, involving the intrusion of local exchange behaviour into the practices of public allocation of water. With irrigation officials in strong rent-seeking positions over farmers, and without resort to a moral sense of community through which farmers might exert voice over official providers, opting out into private provision via tube-well borings and pumpsets has become the exit solution. However, the propensity to make even relatively small investments in bamboo borings is dependent upon access to pumpsets. While élite families own the pumpsets in a village, some farmers may have borings on just some of their land, and others may have no borings of their own at all. Farmers therefore have to enter into multi-layered transactions in order to secure access to timely water. Secure access to other inputs is also necessary. This study encapsulates the themes of: state versus common property resources management; the ‘incentives’ induced by costs of loyalty and the availability of exits to adopt private solutions; and the social embeddedness of behaviour when operating in interlocked, community level markets.     

Between Water Abundance and Scarcity: Discourses,Biofuels, and Power in Piura,Peru

In 2006, transnational ethanol corporations arrived in Chira, a semi‐arid zone located in the Piura region of northern Peru. Large expanses of land were used to produce sugarcane for ethanol, which triggered local concern over the pressure this would mean on the regional water balance. From political ecology, I examine how the state and a corporation produced discourses on the idea of water abundance in the Chira Basin in order to secure water rights, which increased the risk of water scarcity for small communities, pastoralists and farmers in the region. In doing so, I call attention to the discursive strategies aimed to facilitate processes of dispossession under a technical ethos that reinforce capital accumulation. Finally, I argue that water abundance discourses contributed to produce a “waterscape” that not only produced unsustainable water use but also reinforced social inequalities.     

唐代農村家庭生計探略

唐代的農村家庭是一個典型的生産單位和經濟單位。本文通過對於農家的土地占有和糧食産量等資料的考證,討論當時農民家庭的基本收入、消費和生産成本,試圖給出唐代農家經濟生活的大致輪廓。作爲比較的參照系,還對於一般城市平民和低級官僚家庭生活作了簡單勾勒。     

Gendered frontiers of land control: indigenous territory,women and contests over land in Ecuador

Agricultural and rural land has become the site of considerable policy, governmental and scholarly concern worldwide because of violence and dispossession, food insecurity and contests over private property regimes. Such issues are highly gendered in territories with majorities of indigenous populations where overlapping legal regimes (statutory, multicultural, customary) and histories of dispossession have created complex spatialities and access patterns. States' formalization of indigenous rights, neoliberal restructuring and land appropriation are the backdrop to Ecuadorian women's struggles to access, retain and pass on land. Despite a burgeoning literature on Latin American indigenous territories, women are often invisible. Using collaborative research among two indigenous nationalities, the article analyses the political–economic, legal and de facto regimes shaping women's claims to land and indigenous territory. Focusing on Kichwa women in the rural Andes and Tsáchila women in a tropical export-oriented agricultural frontier area, the article examines the criteria and exclusionary practices that operate at multiple scales to shape women's (in)security in tenure. Women's struggles over claims to land and territory are also discussed. The article argues that Latin America's fraught land politics requires a gendered account of indigenous land–territoriality to unpack the cultural bias of western feminist accounts of multiculturalism and to document the racialized gender bias across socio-institutional relations.     

Rubber Erasures,Rubber Producing Rights: Making Racialized Territories in West Kalimantan,Indonesia

This article makes connections between often‐disparate literatures on property, violence and identity, using the politics of rubber growing in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, as an example. It shows how rubber production gave rise to territorialities associated with and productive of ethnic identities, depending on both the political economies and cultural politics at play in different moments. What it meant to be Chinese and Dayak in colonial and post‐colonial Indonesia, as well as how categories of subjects and citizens were configured in the two respective periods, differentially affected both the formal property rights and the means of access to rubber and land in different parts of West Kalimantan. However, incremental changes in shifting rubber production practices were not the only means of producing territory and ethnicity. The author argues that violence ultimately played a more significant role in erasing prior identity‐based claims and establishing the controls of new actors over trees and land and their claims to legitimate access or ‘rightfulness’. Changing rubber production practices and reconfigurations of racialized territories and identity‐based property rights are all implicated in hiding the violence.     

Perceptions of Consumption: Constituting Potters,Farmers and Blacksmiths in the Culinary Continuum in Eastern Tigray,Northern Highland Ethiopia

Despite the integrated and co-dependent nature of crafting vessels and tools and the production of cuisine, the entangled identities of artisan, farmer and cook are rarely envisioned as part of a ‘culinary continuum’ in which the production of culinary equipment, food and cuisine constitutes different categories of people. Studies of cuisine tend to focus on the role of cuisine in negotiating social status and power in feasting contexts or in constituting normative social identities of gender, personhood and ethnicity. Presented is a study of potters, blacksmiths and farmers in eastern Tigray, Ethiopia. Similar to marginalized and casted occupational specialists in many societies across Africa, eastern Tigray’s potters and smiths are marginalized, avoided and demeaned in contexts where food, drink or sex is shared. Normative gender identities are constituted in the enculturation of boys as they learn to grow food and in girls as they learn to cook. Men and women perform these gendered tasks in daily life using separate gendered technological practices and spaces. Potters and blacksmiths transgress normative gender expectations by using technological skills and space differently. The embodiment and performance of their respective crafts are perceived to transform them into different ontological categories of men and women who also are attributed with the dangerous capacity to consume fertility, landscape and people.     

The Return of Displaced Nuer in Southern Sudan: Women Becoming Men?

Conceptualizing war‐time displacement as a catalyst for social change, this article examines the gendered emplacement experiences of returnee displaced women in the aftermath of the recent (1983–2005) civil war in South Sudan. The article attempts to shed light on the strategies of returnee women in transforming and contributing to their communities in the context of an independent South Sudan. It focuses specifically on their gendered emplacement strategies to access land, livelihoods and political rights. Through these diverse actions, some women contest and reconfigure gender identities while others reinforce unequal power relations within their households and communities. These gendered emplacements emphasize the hybridity of place, identity and self in processes of social transformation.