Sandra Bhatasara

Land Reform and Diminishing Spaces for Women in Zimbabwe: a Gender Analysis of the Socio-economic and Political Consequences of the Fast Land Reform Programme Sandra Bhatasara

This thesis is a gender analysis of the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) in Zimbabwe focusing on the socio-economic and political consequences for women. The thesis acknowledges the critical importance of land reform in Zimbabwe as a country that inherited colonially structured and unequal land ownership patterns. However, there are limits to state-led, masculine and politicized land reform when women, as gendered subjects and as a social category are not been seriously considered in theory and practice of land reform programmes. The research uses the Critical Discourse Analysis approach to investigate the objectives, driving forces and the politics of the FTLRP, to establish to what extent the FTLRP created spaces for women to participate in policy and practice, to analyze the impacts of the FTLRP on the poverty of women and to suggest policy recommendations not only for post land reform reconstitution but agrarian development. Whereas land reform was necessary, the thesis shows that the FTLRP diminished opportunities or spaces for women to be empowered and shrunk the democratic spaces for genuine participation of women in the development process.