Women, Land Rights and the Environment: The Kenyan experience

Gender neutral statutory law on land and environment and its interplay with customary, religious and other social norms has impacted significantly on women's rights to access land and environmental resources. To change the prevailing conditions, innovative and radical approaches to land and environmental resources' stewardship are required. Rather than focusing on ownership of land for its own sake, we suggest here that roles that individuals play with regard to the land and environmental resources should determine rights to land and environmental resources. Such a focus would shift the locus of land and environmental resources' control from titular male household heads to the labourers and tenders of land who are mainly women. Development (2006) 49, 43–48. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100274

'They just move in with relatives': translocal labour migrants and transient spaces in Naivasha, Kenya

Over the past four decades, the small town of Naivasha in Kenya has attracted tens of thousands of labour migrants. These migrants are looking for employment on one of the many flower farms located on the shores of Lake Naivasha. This article examines how the migrants, who mostly do not settle in Naivasha permanently, carve out space for themselves in the residential areas where they rent housing. These settlements were not planned for by the government or the flower industry, and are commonly interpreted as hopeless 'slums' that are the outcome of sheer neglect. In contrast, this article analyses the settlements as 'transient spaces': spaces that are particularly volatile, and that are shaped by the highly mobile practices of their residents. In dialogue with literature on East African urban and informal space, this article thus draws attention to the - partly translocal - agency of settlement residents in shaping their living environment. The article is based on fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2016, which included a survey among settlement residents, archival research, and biographical interviews with migrant workers