This title features contributions from the South addressing gender equality and inheritance rights at the household level. Disparities between customary law, family law, and the official legal system are discussed with regard to property rights, marriage, land rights and inheritance. Each article covers the current situation and experiences of violation of women's personal rights and provides policy tools to bring about improvement. Material from across the developing world is included in the annotated bibliography and the resources section. Published in association with KIT Publishers.

Quotas for women in government have swept the globe. Yet we know little about their capacity to upend entrenched social, political, and economic hierarchies. Women, Power, and Property explores this question within the context of India, the world's largest democracy. Brulé employs a research design that maximizes causal inference alongside extensive field research to explain the relationship between political representation, backlash, and economic empowerment. Her findings show that women in government – gatekeepers – catalyze access to fundamental economic rights to property. Women in politics have the power to support constituent rights at critical junctures, such as marriage negotiations, when they can strike integrative solutions to intrahousehold bargaining. Yet there is a paradox: quotas are essential for enforcement of rights, but they generate backlash against women who gain rights without bargaining leverage. In this groundbreaking study, Brulé shows how well-designed quotas can operate as a crucial tool to foster equality and benefit the women they are meant to empower.

Extrait de la couverture : "Legal and customary arrangements and practices govern women's rights and access to resources, such as land and housing. This book highkights women's unequal position in formal and customary laws and practices and the way in which gender relations affect women's and men's access to property through inheritance. The introduction examines how gender relations defiine ownership and control of property and the attention that the issue of gender equality has received in the development agenda. Five reviews from Latin America, Ivory Coast, South Africa, the Middle East and India focus on the disjuncture between law and practice in terms of women's property and land rights, inheritance, access to resources, marriage and employement. These contributions also reflect on the importance of women's participation in decison-making forums and the need for women's political organization and mobilization in order to redress gender imbalances in land and inheritance rights."

Owning Land, Being Women enquires into the processes that establish inheritance as a unique form of property relation in law and society. It focuses on India, examining the legislative processes that led to the 2005 amendment of the Hindu Succession Act 1956, along with several interconnected welfare policies. Scholars have understood these Acts as a response to growing concerns about women’s property rights in developing countries. In re-reading these Acts and exploring the wider nexus of Indian society in which the legislation was drafted, this study considers how questions of family structure and property rights contribute to the creation of legal subjects and demonstrates the significance of the politico-economic context of rights formulation. On the basis of an ethnography of a village in West Bengal, this book brings the moral axis of inheritance into sharp focus, elucidating the interwoven dynamics of bequest, distribution of family wealth and reciprocity of care work that are integral to the logic of inheritance. It explains why inheritance rights based on the notion of individual property rights are inadequate to account for practices of inheritance. Mondal shows that inheritance includes normative structures of affective attachment and expectations, i.e., evaluatively-charged imaginaries of the future that coordinate present practices. These insights pose questions of the dominant resource-based conceptualisation of inherited property in the debate on women’s empowerment. In doing so, this work opens up a line of investigation that brings feminist rights discourse into conversation with ethics, enriching the liberal theory of gender justice.

This book explores the customary, social, economic political and rights issues surrounding access, ownership and control over land from a gender perspective. It combines theory and practice from researchers, lawyers and judges, each with track records of working on women and rights concerns. The nexus between the reluctance to recognize and materialize women's right to land, and the increasing feminization of poverty is undeniable. The problem assumes special acuity in an essentially agrarian context like Cameroon, where the problem is not so much the law as its manner of application. That this book delves into investigating the principal sources and reasons for this prevalent injustice is particularly welcome. As some of the analyses reveal, denying women their right to land acquisition or inheritance is sometimes contrary to established judicial precedents and even in total dissonance with the country's constitution. Traditional and cultural shibboleths associated with land acquisition and ownership that tend to stymie women's development and fulfilment, must be quickly shirked, for such retrograde excuses can no longer find comfort in the law, morality nor in "modern" traditional thinking. The trend, albeit timid, of appointing women to Land Consultative Boards and even as traditional authorities, can only be salutary. These are some positive practical steps that can translate the notion of equal rights into "equal power" over land for both sexes; otherwise "equality" in this context will remain an unattractive slogan.

In this paper, we explore how different norms around property rights affect the empowerment of women of different social positions over the life cycle. We first review the conceptual foundations of property, empowerment, and intersectionality, and then present the methodology and empirical findings from ethnographic field work in Nepal. Going beyond formal ownership of property, we look at changes in property rights over personal and joint property at different stages of women’s lives. Finally, the paper makes recommendations for how research and development projects, especially in South Asia, can avoid misinterpreting asset and empowerment data by incorporating nuance around the concepts of property rights over the household life cycle

An analysis of gender and property throughout South Asia which argues that the most important economic factor affecting women is the gender gap in command over property.

Focuses on the Hindu Succession Act of 1956.