This project investigates the changing role of women and leadership. Using land access as the lens, the project will explore the social and economic status of women in a country where many consider gender equality to be the norm. Men are returning home from working in mines and a sweeping land reform process is changing how land is held in Lesotho. The project centers on three research questions: (1) How and why has access to land for men and women changed as men have returned and since new laws were enacted in the last decade? (2) Is there a geography of land that is allocated to women and how has that geography changed over time? (3) Are leaders seeking to maintain their power over land allocation? If so, how do their land control maneuvers affect both men's and women's access to land?
These questions will be answered in a village setting in Lesotho with eight months of qualitative fieldwork, including surveys, interviews and focus groups with local residents and chiefs. Additional work will focus on interviews with policymakers, bureaucrats and development experts in the capital, Maseru. This study will explore multiple scales of gender politics in terms of land committees in Lesotho. The project will enhance understanding of the social, political, economic and cultural conditions that lead to increased or reduced vulnerability of women's livelihoods. Gender is a key indicator of vulnerability; understanding how women can obtain more secure land rights is a powerful tool in mitigating vulnerability. The analysis will also make a contribution to the literature of authority. It seeks to understand the role of Lesotho's chieftaincy in a changing political-economic context. In terms of authority, the study expands ideas of co-optation of chiefs by the state and investigates what happens when elements of the chieftaincy are empowered at the same time as an elected local body (in fact, within that very body). The project seeks to help understand gender relations in a holistic way that may enhance understanding of the feminization of the AIDS crisis. Additionally, there is a clear policy implication to this work: land reform in Lesotho and throughout the developing world is an ongoing process and this study will identify pathways towards fairer distribution. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish an independent research career.
This award funded eight months of dissertation field research on land rights, gender and authority in Lesotho, Southern Africa. Using data from household surveys, and interviews, this dissertation research examines the impact of a major land reform on women’s access to and control of land. This project explores the social relationships and land holding patterns that have been created or altered by that reform. The land reform was funded by the U.S.'s Millennium Challenge Corporation and had three main objectives. The first was to turn a traditional land rights system, in which land access and control were governed by chiefly allocation documents, into a market-driven system. In the new arrangement, governed by land leases, land rights include sale rights and are designed to make it easier to borrow against one's home equity. This, the logic goes, will create economic growth that leads to poverty reduction. The second goal was to transfer chiefly authority over land allocation to elected officials. This objective stemmed from a view that chiefs were difficult to sanction and potentially capricious/corrupt. Elected officials were thought by donors to be more responsive to the needs of constituents. Finally, the reform was aimed at securing women’s control over land. The land reform mandated that women’s names appear on leases alongside their husbands’; inheritance laws for widows were also made more explicitly favorable to women through Land Act 2010. Lesotho’s land reform aimed to correct perceived injustices and insecurities in the country’s land rights system. This NSF research project investigated the relative success of the reforms in creating a climate of land security and equity, especially for women. Intellectual Merit: Land issues are about far more than just land. They also encompass "questions of authority, citizenship and the politics of jurisdiction." This project speaks to those questions. The legislative protection of women 's land rights is a necessary condition for women's empowerment, but an insufficient one. Women's empowerment requires access to resources, and it has been demonstrated that women need secure access to land for such empowerment. Our research project shows that despite these conditions, only certain kinds of women are able to genuinely benefit from the laws and the most vulnerable are largely left behind. The institutions and authorities that implement these laws determine who benefits from the legal reform. This project contributes to the literature on women and land by asking if the changes taking place in Lesotho are sufficient to protect and empower women. Finally, the case of Lesotho is a particularly interesting one from a land tenure theory perspective. Until this one, nearly all major land reforms in sub-Saharan Africa focused on agrarian production. This reform focuses on economic productivity from a non-agricultural perspective and will allow for increased understanding of the gender implications of market-led reforms that do not have an agricultural production imperative at their hearts. The results of this research indicate that the goals of the land reform are, at least nominally, being realized. More leases are being distributed to residents of the research site, and a majority of them are going to women or jointly to married couples. This is in contrast to before the law's passage, when fewer than 15% of leases went to women or married couples. The study also suggests that a major development undertaking that was intended to help the lives of Basotho has had outcomes far more complex than that. The security of tenure created by mandating leases throughout Maseru is more beneficial to the wealthy than the poor whom the reforms targeted. Far more women have received leases than ever before since the reform, and chiefs appear to have been successfully marginalized. However, for gender and authority, these are incomplete pictures. This work illustrates that women in one village have been empowered by the leases, but their security is potentially fleeting. Land development investors, with help from government bureaucrats, seem poised to make investments that may dispossess many new leaseholders of their land. Chiefs have not been marginalized in favor of elected officials. Instead, a handful of government bureaucrats appear to have seized authority over land allocation. These bureaucrats are just as unaccountable to village people as chiefs were. Broader Impacts: The Co-PI benefited from professional development in a variety of ways, including by conducting rigorous qualitative research in Lesotho, enhancing his understanding of policy formulation and implementation, and measuring outcomes. He also greatly improved his Sesotho language skills and cultural communication. Work stemming from this project has been presented at the UNDP Conference on Sustainable Land Management in Maseru, the Women & Gender in Global Perspectives speaker series at the University of Illinois and the Association of American Geographers' annual meeting. The Co-PI also disseminated preliminary results to contacts within his research village, government and parastatal contacts that figured most prominently in the study.
