Women’s Rights to Land and Productive Resources

The second edition of this UN Women and OHCHR guide treats land not as a single asset but as a foundation for livelihood, housing, food, security and political participation. It brings together international standards, legal protections and examples of practice around women’s rights to land and other productive resources. Its scope is broader than titled farmland: the guide discusses different forms of land and tenure, including individual, joint, collective, community and customary arrangements. The second edition was published in 2020 and updates information through mid-2019.

The guide’s rights frame is deliberately more demanding than “access.” A person may be allowed to work land without being able to decide how it is used, keep its income, transfer it, inherit it or participate in the institution that governs it. Ownership, use, control, transfer, inheritance and participation are related, but not interchangeable. This distinction helps explain why a program that gives women inputs or training can leave the basic distribution of authority untouched.

Law matters, but formal equality on paper does not by itself settle how rights are realized. Registration procedures, inheritance rules, public services and local institutions affect whether women can claim a right in practice. The guide also makes room for collective and customary tenure, an important reminder that “women’s land rights” cannot always be reduced to issuing an individual title. A feminist policy must ask both whether women can exercise rights within a community and whether their community’s land and resource claims are protected from dispossession.

The guide is most useful as a framework for connecting land to a wider set of productive resources and human rights, rather than as a universal blueprint that erases local histories. Read critically, it invites questions about who controls decisions and benefits, which women are recognized by law and administration, and whose tenure systems are treated as legitimate. Those questions connect agricultural policy to Indigenous sovereignty, care, economic security and political voice without assuming that every community’s preferred form of tenure is the same.

Pair it with FAO’s global account of women in agrifood systems, its Latin America and Caribbean regional report, and FemRes’s analysis of Indigenous women’s rights in Latin America. Together, these works connect legal standards to labor and regional struggles over resources. Consult the official UN record and the full second-edition guide.