Experiences of Legal Pluralism in Sierra Leone: Land Governance, Neoliberal Dispossession and Gender (In)justice

Abstract

Sierra Leone's land governance reform policies are often based on the neoliberal assumption that market growth, gender equality and women's empowerment are mutually compatible objectives. Contrary to this assumption, this article argues that while market-oriented reforms can help to destabilize legal and cultural norms that are discriminatory on the basis of gender, they also introduce other forms of dispossession by eroding the tenurial security and land use rights extended to women in the chieftain and lineage systems of customary land tenure. Disruption of these existing secondary land rights of women is intensified when the land is endowed with valuable resources that are of interest to the state and global capital. The authors characterize this as neoliberal dispossession and argue that, although such dispossession is no longer based on gender norms around marriage, family and personal inheritance, it nonetheless results in the same economic and tenurial insecurity for poor rural women that reformers promise to address.