Dynamics of Women's Land Rights, Agrarian Change and Gender Transformation in Zimbabwe's Fast Track Land Reform Programme

Abstract

Women’s land rights feature prominently in contemporary policy debates on agrarian change and gender transformation in Africa, although often accompanied by a certain weary skepticism about what this prominence signifies. On the one hand, policy-makers invoke women as an important category for attention, while on the other hand, analysts and activists regularly denounce the gap between high-level policy commitments and implementation. The basis of this paper is to establish the dynamics of women's land rights, agrarian change and gender transformation in Zimbabwe's fast track land reform programme. Using a qualitative method of inquiry based on interviews, focus group discussions and observations with study participants in Bubi district, an empirical material is constructed and interpreted. Using constructivist grounded theory, dynamics of women’s social goals and strategies in production and reproduction are identified, mapped out and analysed. Drawing on gender theory and new institutional theory, which recognise power and discursive signs of institutional change in rules, norms and values, it uncovers layers of social complexity in the dynamics of female and male land rights as well as between male land rights and female labour in the gender regime. In so doing, it shows how power relations emerging from unequal land and labour rights are enacted in cooperation, competition and conflict, between spouses and between co-wives. The findings show how land, besides being a natural resource for food production, is an important social, cultural and intergenerational symbol in Bubi district. This has implications for women and for their position and room of manoeuvre in food production. It also shows how the gender regime is subject to incremental institutional change through gendered agency, mainly from within the regime but accelerated by land scarcity as an external process. To conclude, the gender regime of land and labour rights has implications for how gender is enacted in everyday strategies, constructed in terms of female and male identities and configured in terms of masculinity and femininity. In the end, it is argued, these conditions affect food production and, in its extension, also food security and gender transformation. This study recommends on the importance of disaggregating women and designing policies that recognise class and other differences among them, and cater for women’s interests in land.