Working Papers

While governments and development agencies have prioritised formalising property rights over the past few decades, evidence on the gendered impacts of these efforts remains limited. This article builds on an impact evaluation of a massive intervention aimed at improving land tenure security in Mozambique to begin filling crucial empirical gaps on the extent to which property reforms affect women and men differently. While our larger impact evaluation finds formalisng land rights significantly improved household-level tenure security in urban Mozambique, our novel endline survey of 850 husband and wife pairs combined with detailed focus group discussions provide important evidence that individual-level effects vary substantially for women. Women who are explicitly listed on formal documents experience improved decision-making power and rights over their household’s land. However, women were rarely listed on documents during this intervention, and we argue that gatekeeping by household heads, as well as existing community gender norms, structure both the implementation and potential impacts of programs focused on women’s property rights. Based on our findings, we caution that omitting women’s names when formalising household land rights may even exacerbate household inequalities. This article makes several important empirical contributions to research on gender, urban property rights, and development.

Gender gaps in political participation are particularly large in developing countries. Though developing countries are rapidly urbanizing, evidence on urban gender gaps remains scarce and almost entirely omits a vast yet politically active population — those residing in informal settlements (or “slums”). This article proposes and tests a framework explaining how gender and informality intersect to create distinctive gender gaps in political behavior in informal urban areas. Drawing on existing literature and original interviews with urban slum residents, I argue that key characteristics of slum neighborhoods — their social and physical density as well as their reliance on political mobilization to access neighborhood resources — have important implications for women’s participation. I test my expectations with original household survey and social networks data from over 9,000 from three Indian cities. I find 1.) women are as embedded and active in neighborhood clientelistic networks as men; 2.) women in slums are just as active as men in communal mobilization efforts to improve neighborhood outcomes; and 3.) women’s participation varies meaningfully across these settlements. This article advances an understanding of how rapid urbanization will affect gender gaps in the Global South and calls for far more research to be conducted on this topic.

Urban economic growth is often associated with transformation in the name of development. However, to build new roads or create green space, city planners transform the preexisting urban environment, often displacing cities’ most vulnerable residents. As developing countries rapidly urbanize, millions of residents of informal settlements are at risk of eviction each year, often without advance notice or alternate arrangements upon displacement. Despite the important consequences of these trends, there is strikingly little quantitative evidence on which settlements governments displace in the name of modernization and why. This article investigates displacement in the case of Patna, Bihar, India. We combine a unique set of five data sources to empirically assess which prevailing theoretical explanations for displacement best explain eviction patterns. These sources include administrative surveys of urban slums, pre-eviction original household surveys with slum residents, repeated post-eviction interviews with key informants from the same settlements, panel analysis of satellite images, and novel geospatial data on local economic activity. Our findings reveal that officials primarily targeted the poorest settlements located on the least economically valuable land for displacement, and up to four years after displacement these areas have rarely been redeveloped. Eviction orders were carried out by officials from higher administrative levels, and local political connections did not prevent evictions. We argue our findings collectively support the logic that higher-level officials order evictions to assert their authority in a context of complex overlapping jurisdictions, rather than for economic development purposes. Future scholarship should continue to empirically examine how local political and economic factors can produce divergent displacement patterns across cities.

Female labor force participation has slowed or stalled in many rapidly growing low- and middle-income economies, even as women report wanting paid work. Using original surveys grounded in extensive fieldwork with hard-to-reach informal populations in India, we examine the gap between labor force participation and stated demand for work. Our survey-experimental and qualitative evidence shows women and their families hold surprisingly aligned preferences, expressing strong aversions to the economic risks characterizing informal work, and consistent preferences for income stability. Preferences for low-risk jobs are as strong as, and often stronger than, preferences for gender-norm compliant work — such as coworker gender or proximity to home — that has received considerable attention in existing research. We argue that the labor force participation gap reflects both scarce suitable jobs and gendered search costs for work. These dynamics constrain women’s labor force participation, with downstream implications for their civic and political engagement.

Nearly one-sixth of humanity live in urban “slums” — neighborhoods that lack access to secure property rights and basic services — and this number is increasing rapidly as developing countries continue to urbanize. Despite their proximity to public servants and public services, slum residents remain largely disconnected from formal institutions. On top of exclusion from government resources, slum residents are also subjected to threats of displacement and financial exploitation from a range of both state and non-state actors. To mitigate these vulnerabilities, residents draw on informal political strategies to negotiate with the state for material improvements. Yet, despite a shared context of poverty and informality, residents of different slums vary considerably in how they engage politically. What explains differences in political behavior across settlements? Drawing on in-depth interviews with over 100 Indian slum residents and leaders, I propose a framework to explain how neighborhood characteristics shape political strategies across slum settlements. I argue slums vary along two key dimensions — access to formal resources (including, for example, property rights and identification documents) and strength of informal political networks — that are crucial for understanding whether and how residents negotiate with the state. I test this framework with original survey data from nearly 10,000 households from over 200 neighborhoods from Bengaluru, Jaipur, and Patna, India. These data comprise some of the most comprehensive data on Indian slums currently available to researchers. The findings not only have important implications for understanding development outcomes, but also for understanding how the urban poor understand and exercise their rights as citizens.

Mobile phone ownership has surged around the world. Estimates suggest nearly 69% of the world’s population subscribes to a mobile service. At the same time, gaps between men and women’s mobile phone ownership remains substantial. In 2020, 20 million more men were digitally connected than women. This gender digital divide—which refers to disparities between women and men’s access to and use of digital technologies, is observed virtually everywhere in the world, with the largest gulfs in low- and middle-income countries. These gaps have such powerful social, political and economic implications for women’s advancement that the United Nations’ under-secretary has declared the gender digital divide, the “new face of gender inequality” The potential benefits of cellphones make the reasons for widespread equity concerns apparent. Mobile phones play an important role in boosting economic opportunity and facilitating education and healthcare service delivery, among other important benefits (OECD 2018). At the same time, such advantages are mostly accessible to individuals with regular mobile phone access—phone owners.

While extant work examines the ways the gender digital divide stymies women’s economic empowerment (Roessler et al. 2021), researchers have completely overlooked the political consequences of this divide. We examine this lacuna. Specifically, we ask: How do gender gaps in cellphone ownership influence disparities in men’s and women’s civic and political participation?

Climate change has highly unequal consequences for vulnerable populations in the Global South, yet we know little about how urban slum residents perceive climate change or make environmental policy demands. How do experience and information shape policy preferences and political claim-making on environmental issues? We conducted an original survey of 900 low-income households across 30 slums in Jaipur, India. We find that, while scientific climate knowledge is low, experience and worry about hazards like extreme heat are widespread. Still, urban slum residents prioritize immediate public service concerns (water, drainage) over environmental issues (floods, fires, air pollution), and political claim-making mirrors this. In the abstract, almost half of the sample does not believe that anything can be done about climate issues or extreme heat. However, when given specific details, residents show strong support for climate policy interventions. Our findings highlight the importance of issue-framing and context-specific information; many essential public services are also climate adaptation strategies, and a group that is already politically mobilized may make environmental demands if provided with concrete policy options.

Scholars have long argued that urbanization will transform women’s political participation. Yet these theories give limited attention to a defining feature of contemporary urbanization: informality. As urbanization reshapes political life across the Global South, a largely separate empirical literature seeks to explain everyday politics in urban slums, examining how city residents secure basic services through brokers, party networks, and claim-making in today’s cities. This work, however, has been relatively silent on how gender structures these forms of engagement. In this paper, we bridge existing literatures on gender, urbanization, and urban informal politics, arguing that informality may plausibly expand women’s participation in some domains while constraining it in others. Using an original multi-wave dataset from informal settlements in three Indian cities (2015–2023), we present preliminary descriptive evidence on gender inequalities, gender gaps in preferences, and women’s participation across electoral politics, inter-electoral civic engagement, and community leadership. We then outline priorities for future comparative research within each of these domains. By highlighting puzzles about how contemporary urbanization trends may augment some forms of participation while diminishing others, and by beginning to fill gaps in evidence on women’s participation where systematic data remain scarce, we aim to catalyze a broader agenda on gender and everyday politics in rapidly urbanizing democracies.