Engendering The Land Grab: Development, Involuntary Resettlement, And The Struggles For Social Reproduction In Coastal Tanzania

Abstract

ABSRTACT This thesis engages with the feminist concept of 'social reproduction' to arrive at a richer understanding of the gendered processes and outcomes of land grabbing. It focuses on a case of a contemporary land deal for sugarcane production in the Coast Region of Tanzania and the resultant process of involuntary resettlement. It critically examines the technical ways in which involuntary resettlement is planned and managed, and the multi-faceted ways in which rural women and men experience the disruption of their pre-existing modes of social reproduction. It argues that land grabbing, or the enclosure of rural landscapes more generally, does more than strip peasants and pastoralists of their means of production and turns them into wage labourers. It uproots them from the cultural practices, socio-ecological knowledges, and historical memory that are deeply rooted on the land, and dislocates them from complex webs of gender relations of power, which must be renegotiated.