Women, Land Rights and the Environment: The Kenyan experience
- PDF / 99,723 Bytes
- 6 Pages / 539 x 703 pts Page_size
- 96 Downloads / 154 Views
Thematic Section
Women, Land Rights and the Environment: The Kenyan experience
PATRICIA KAMERIMBOTE
ABSTRACT Gender neutral statutory law on land and environment and its interplay with customary, religious and other social norms has impacted significantly on women’s rights to access land and environmental resources. To change the prevailing conditions, innovative and radical approaches to land and environmental resources’ stewardship are required. Rather than focusing on ownership of land for its own sake, we suggest here that roles that individuals play with regard to the land and environmental resources should determine rights to land and environmental resources. Such a focus would shift the locus of land and environmental resources’ control from titular male household heads to the labourers and tenders of land who are mainly women. KEYWORDS Access; control; ownership; law; gender; property; sustainable development
Introduction Concerns about women’s access to, control over and ownership of land and resources have been raised over the years at different but inter-related levels. Land and environmental resources are central to the lives of people living in countries whose economic development and subsistence depends on the resources. With regard to environmental resources, women’s access to and control over forests, water and wildlife has come into sharp focus as it has become clear that the performance of women’s day to day chores is anchored on these resources. Making access to land and environmental resources equitable is one way to achieve development. The Millennium Development Goals recognize the need to promote gender equality and empower women, the need to alleviate poverty and ensure sustainable environmental management. Feminist critiques of development have identified the marginalization of women from the means of production as a critical factor in the subordination of women. (Boserup,1970) The context within which access to land and environmental resources occurs is nuanced by diverse factors. First, the conceptualization of gender as a social construct where roles and realms of operation of men and women are set and translated into power relationships where masculinity and femininity denote differentiated entitlements to resources. Second, there are different legal orders used to allocate resources. Law can empower or disempower its subjects in the quest for access to resources. Legal Development (2006) 49(3), 43–48. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100274
Development 49(3): Thematic Section
44
equality may result in substantive inequality where the prevailing situation of legal subjects is not taken into account. Third, the patriarchal social ordering of many societies in African countries makes access to resources tilted in favour of male members of society. In this regard, laws intended to grant equal access for men and women yield very different outcomes upon application in a much gendered context (Dahl,1987; Mackinnon, 2005). Fourth, globalization and technological development impact on ac
Data Loading...
