Grabbing the female commons: large-scale land acquisitions for forest plantations and impacts on gender relations in Kilolo district, Iringa Region, Tanzania.

This chapter focuses on the impacts of the ways in which large-scale land acquisitions consolidate commonly owned land that affects women’s resilience differently than men. It argues that the commons enclosure through large-scale land acquisitions (LSLA) mainly has negative impacts on women, involving increased workloads. The chapter suggests that resilience – in terms of food security – is therefore negatively impacted, creating an imbalance between gender and generation based on the power relation and discusses a new institutionalism (NI) perspective in social anthropology. The NI perspective is about institutional transformations driven by change in the relative price of land due to the LSLA that leads powerful actors to select among a plurality of institutions. In addition, the LSLA also increases wives’ dependency on their husbands as their resource base that gave them certain freedom in action has been reduced, leaving them completely reliant on the husbands’ relatives’ property, which is mostly controlled by elderly men.