Paper short abstract:

Customary communal land (e.g. grazing land) is at the crossroads of land-titling in Danno district, Ethiopia. Based on ethnographic research, this paper analyzes state-driven land formalization programs and their consequences for gender relations on the local level.

Paper long abstract:

Disregarding the different economic and social qualities of land and the prevailing bundles of rights, the ruling Ethiopian government has introduced land-titling programs in order to consolidate the state's ownership rights of rural land. Before these programs were implemented, men and women in Danno district used land for communally grazing following customarily equitable structures. Custom-based institutions (e.g. iddir) used to mediate access to communal land, while socially embedded exchange systems (e.g. sora) used to enable insiders (including women) as well as outsiders (e.g. newcomers) to gain access to communal land. The government's recent attempt to formalize customary land, however, has enabled the state to expand control over the communal land by various means such as "legitimation" and "coercion" (Hall et al. 2011). Yet, some male farmers but women have resisted governmental interventions by dividing their land among themselves, maintaining "exclusion" by using force or by mobilizing customary norms. Based on ethnographic research, this paper shows how state-driven land titling programs affect customary communal land tenure. Assuming the lens of an intersectional analysis, it looks at how the reconfigurations of a regime of access have altered gender and socio-economic relations in rural Ethiopia. It reveals how the competition between different actors comes with ambiguous consequences in regard to "access" (Ribot/Peluso 2003) and "exclusion" (Hall et al. 2011) for their ability to benefit from communal land.