Gender dimensions of land policy in contemporary Mozambique : a case study of Ndixe village, Marracuene District, southern Mozambique

Bibliography: leaves 269-288.In this thesis, I set out to investigate women's rights to the land and how these are shaped by gender relations. I investigate the meaning and significance of 'customary' tenure in the present day context, some 25 years after Independence and after the end of 16 years of armed conflict in the countryside. I ask to what extent customary norms are still practised and whether or not they disadvantage women? I also challenge the premises of neo-liberal theory underwriting the current land policy and on-going proposals for land reform: namely that increased tenure security can be guaranteed by formal law, that this will encourage investment and thus 'alleviate' rural poverty. These assumptions are explicit in the National Land Policy, which ostensibly aims to 'alleviate poverty' and 'promote growth with equity' through ensuring land tenure security for family and private sector investors, whilst liberalising transactions in land. My investigation sets out from the premise that land tenure arrangements in any society are deeply embedded in the existing socio-economic context [Peters 1987; Bassett 1993] and that these inform and are informed by gender relations. Gender roles and identities are seen here as learned and negotiated, but they are negotiated from different positions of power by women and men [Archer l992; Agarwal 1994; Kandiyoti 1998]. I further assume that custom is not a static edifice but a changing and flexible social institution that is shaped by historical events and individual interpretations [Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983]. Based on these assumptions, I take a theoretical approach which draws on the work of social scientists such as Anthony Giddens [1979, 1982, 1984] and Ernesto Laclau [Laclau & Moulfe 1985; Laclau 1990], as well as recent feminist literature (see Chapter Two), in seeking to resolve the tension between structure and agency in sociological analysis. My research involves an exploration of the competing theories underlying land policy changes, from colonial time to the present. l argue that, despite radically different strategies, the current neo-liberal as well as the former colonial and then socialist approaches to rural development in Mozambique adhere to a modernisation paradigm that privileges material accumulation. By the same token, it devalues the reproductive and subsistence labour predominantly performed by women. I argue that an analysis of gendered power relations has been largely missing from analyses of land tenure and agrarian policy. This has negative implications for the likely achievement of the Governments current policy goals, namely those of achieving 'growth with equity'. Against this background, the principal focus of my research is a case study in one rural village, Ndixe, in Marracuene District of southern Mozambique. Through the case study, I seek to understand the gender dimensions of land access and control in the current period