General

The purpose of this study is to investigate how processes of individual/household land titling and agricultural intensification initiatives affect women’s and land-holding lineages’ land rights, and how they affect gendered land-related responsibilities under matrilineal tenure systems. While African policy documents highlight women’s land tenure insecurity as a key development problem, land reforms through regularisation are usually based on the implicit assumption is that land tenure is patrilineal. Furthermore, when customary land rights are formalised through ‘community delimitations’, in spite of non-discriminatory intentions, there is a tendency to formalisation bringing about a strengthening of male roles and authorities, in both patrilineal and matrilineal communities. In a context of a community-based land tenure reform in Nampula Province in Northern Mozambique, we aim to carry out field-based studies in communities where traditional tenure arrangements have been matrilineal. We will focus on four main issues: i) titling processes and women’s roles, ii) land rights and gendered responsibilities, iii) access to and control of land, and iv) agricultural intensification and subsistence. The research approach is qualitative, based on a comparative case study of three delimited communities. So far, there are no systematic research findings reported in the scholarly literature on this particular topic.

General

Climate change will cause extreme fluctuations in precipitation and temperatures generating intense drought and rainfall events. This will affect the functioning of most ecosystems, but the most severely affected include the world’s poorest and food security challenged nations, including Ethiopia. Microorganisms control decomposition of organic matter (OM), and dominate the terrestrial contribution to the global carbon (C) cycle. Water availability is a decisive regulator of microbial processes, but they also depend on C-availability, creating a strong feedback with plants. We will investigate how microbial processes are influenced by changes in water availability across a gradient from cool moist to hot arid Ecosystems in Ethiopia. We will evaluate the effect of different land-uses and field experimental drought on the resilience of microbial functions. Insights will be included in ecosystem models, and used to guide land-use policy in Ethiopia. The aims are: 1. Defining the microbial moisture dependence, and the resilience of the microbial functions to rewetting a soil. 2. Determining both long-term (gradient across Ethiopia) and short-term (within site field-experiments) legacy effects of drought and dry-wet cycles on 1. 3. Disentangling the relative influence of the soil microbial community and land-use on 1. 4. Distinguishing how land-use, restoration of degraded soils, and plant material additions can affect the microbial resilience to drought and variable moisture.