The Nordic states were among the first in the world to enact general gender equality and anti-discrimination laws with low threshold enforcement mechanisms. Today, the Nordic countries top the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index – but have still not succeeded in closing the gender gap. This book draws a diverse and complex picture of the long, uneven and unfinished process towards substantive equality in four Nordic countries: Sweden, Finland, Norway and Iceland. It presents the Nordic gender equality model’s systematic use of three measures: overarching gender policies, legislation that has an explicit or implicit impact on gender relations and gender equality and anti-discrimination laws with low threshold enforcement systems. What potentials and limitations does the Nordic gender equality and anti-discrimination law regimes have to combat individual discrimination and structural inequality? Can these regimes function as a driver of political, legal, economic, cultural and social change, and as a corrective to laws, policies and practices that uphold existing inequalities, and, if so, to what extent? Can weaknesses in the equality and anti-discrimination laws and the way they are enforced hamper efforts to close remaining gender gaps? Rather than looking at the Nordic gender equality laws and policies in isolation, the book situates their development and transformative potential within a changing European and international political and legal landscape.

In the context of increasing privatization and land reform these case studies reveal how reforms impact on women's rights to land and how these rights are contested or upheld. This volume focuses on the impact on women's land rights from the contemporary drive towards the formulation and implementation of land tenure reforms which aim primarily at the private registration of land. It is solidly groundedin the findings from seven case studies, all based on in-depth qualitative research, from various regions of Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda. The detailed, local level research in this volume not only challenges the status quo, but demonstrates that another world is possible and documents the many ways women in Eastern Africa are finding to ensure their rights to land. BIRGIT ENGLERT is Assistant Professor in the Department of African Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria; ELIZABETH DALEY is an independent land consultant. Uganda: Fountain Publishers(PB); Kenya: EAEP(PB); Tanzania: E&D Vision Publishing(PB)