How formalization closed the gender land gap in Peru and the impact on women's empowerment

In under a decade, Peru has given title deeds to six million land parcels. While the area istraditional male dominated, our research has uncovered that the reform's gender component hascaused 58 per cent of all land to now be jointly owned between husband and wife. This success isunprecedented in the world as gender equality policies are normally not implemented in the field.The Peruvian case implies an important redistribution of capital in the form of land property frommen to women. In this project we study the effect of such redistribution on the power-relationshipwithin the household. Bargaining theory indicate the spouses consider the fall back situation incase of divorce. With joint property rights, women now have the right to half of in if she decidesto break away from the husband. This makes her less afraid of raising her voice and demanding influence while married as she knows she will be better able to cope with consequences in the worst case scenario of divorce.The PeruLandGender project set out to test this empowerment hypothesis empirically byconducting three types of organised methods in rural communities in the Peruvian highland.We started by conducting (i) semi-structured interviews using young anthropologists who livedwith each household for a week, then (ii) conducted a household survey of 1280 households interviewing both the man and women of the principal couple on household decision-making andfinally (iii) invited the same couples to take part in field experiments that revealed the relativeinfluence of each partner in this specific situation.We find that women in communities with joint ownership between man and women are moreempowered than women in communities where such land titling did not take place in the household survey. We also find that land inheritance, a index of property rights, do lead to more empoweredwomen in the experiments. The titling effort reduces the contributin in public goods games for men, while there is no difference for women. All publications appears on the project homepages http://perulandgender.nibrinternational.no.

The Special Land Titling and Cadastre Project (PETT) in Peru has over the last decade issued titles for over 5.8 million agricultural plots, unique in the world when it comes to the extent and speed of the process. Fifty-six per cent of all plots belongin g to households with couples became jointly titled, something which represents a top-down, institutionally induced gender revolution since men were normally considered the owner under customary tenure. Our main aim is to investigate how joint titling has affected, and hopefully improved, the position of women when it concerns decision-making, both within the family and in their communities. Our research strategy is to apply both qualitative and quantitative methods. A household questionnaire survey on la nd use, perceived ownership, female bargaining and decision-making power, access to credit, etc., will be conducted in districts where both individually titled and nontitled communities co-exist. There is a historical explanation for PETT's exclusion of t he latter from individual titling, something which carries little impact on land tenure in practice, and they hence become the perfect control groups. The involved researchers, doctoral or master's degree students will conduct qualitative research intervi ews with the same households and other key informants both at the community and regional levels.