Tenure vs. territory

Tenure is said to be among the key issues to have a bearing on sustainable forest management and gender equity (see the Introduction to this volume). But in a recent occasional paper on gender and forests in the Amazon, Schmink and Gómez-García lament that there is relatively little literature on women, gender and forest management in Latin America, and not a single citation referred to “tenure and/or property rights in the region” (2015: 2). This would seem odd given that in the late twentieth century, many Latin American states have legally recognized indigenous and Afro-descendants’ collective land and resource rights over 200 million hectares of mostly forested lands (Bryan 2012; Larson et al. 2008). Or as I argue, rather than lacunae in the literature, discussions of tenure rights in forested areas of Latin America, including the Amazon, are occurring as part of discussions about territorial rights and territoriality. These latter draw and build on the large and growing literature on land and agrarian reform in Latin America, and how these intersect with women’s rights and gender inequality, especially in the context of neoliberal economic policies. ¹