Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Gendering the Land Issue

Do property rights have the power to lift people, more specifically women, out of lasting poverty?

By: Ida Bergstrøm, Stakeholder Forum

In the midst of an overshadowing food crisis, calls for food aid and polarized debates over bio- and agro fuels, a side event organized by among others UN Habitat yesterday, ‘Gendering Land Tools: From Policy to Practice’, called for other issues to enter the top of the CSD agenda. Chairing the event, Norwegian Ambassador Ms Mona Brøther called for the development of lasting, just, holistic and economically viable land tools. ‘Land tools should be part of the core to come out of this CSD’, she said, adding that ‘We hope the messages from this session will be mainstreamed into the overall session’.

For women on the ground

The issue of gendering land tools of course, is far from straight forward. Neither is it necessarily obvious what exactly the term means. That gender in most development contexts mainly refers to women is more or less established fact, but as pointed out by the panelists this is hardly remarkable as large disparities between women and men usually seem to leave the former at a disadvantage. Perhaps slightly remarkable was the fact that the only male panelist, Siraj Sait, from the University of East London, was the only one to call attention to the fact that women are a heterogeneous and diverse group, and that the category of gender always needs to be cross checked against other factors such as class, race, age, ethnicity and so on. Sait has done extensive research on developing tools for Muslim women’s equal property rights, by not necessarily re-interpreting but perhaps rather identifying women’s rights within the Qur’an and Sharia, and enabling women to claim and benefit from these. A grassroots level initiative, Sait highlighted that the projects are led by the women themselves; ‘This is for women on the ground to say this is my religion, this is what I believe in, and these are my rights’.

Representing another grassroots perspective, Femina Duka from the Philippines, presented a practical approach to land ownership on a community based grassroots level. Duka spoke of community approaches to mortgages, poverty mapping, savings mobilisation and direct purchase strategies. Thanking the panel for allowing her voice a space in which to be heard, Duka maintained that the right to land use was a higher priority than land ownership, prompting questions from the floor in regards the different levels of security and empowerment implied by the two options.

Bottom-up and Top-down

Amid micro and macro level testaments, Brøther highlighted the complex issue of reform processes that need to be based on bottom-up approaches, yet at the same time necessarily have to be implemented from the top down. Other challenges according to Brøther lie in the concept of the Rule of Law; Is law always good, how is the law conceptualised by the poor themselves, and is it better to be able to survive in the informal sectors and avoid the alleged protection of the law? Formalisation does not mean security or gender sensitivity in and of itself.

Nevertheless, Brøther, representing the country that took the initiative to set up ‘The Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor’ and one of the main forces behind pushing this agenda, believes the power of property rights to be monumental in the fight toward sustainable development; ‘I tend to see a clear link between land issues and sustainable development, and that ownership and formal rights to people must be extended as universal rights, to secure sustainability in management of resources as well as dignity to each human being. To be an economic subject, and not object, is in itself a goal and a platform to lift people out of lasting poverty.’