Francesca di Matteo – Researcher and Deputy Director
Francesca Di Matteo holds a PhD in Political Anthropology (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Scieces Sociale, Marseille) while her previous academic training was in Politics (SciencesPo Bordeaux; Alma Mater Studiorum, Bologna). The doctoral study she carried out is at the crossroad of these academic fields, espousing the empiricism and actor-centered approaches of Anthropology with institutional subjects of inquiry of Political Sciences. In her PhD, she traced and reconstructed the social life of the land reform agenda in Kenya from the 1990s to 2016. Particular attention was paid to land tenure reforms and actors’ negotiations revolving around customary land regimes or community land. She privileged an historical approach that put into perspective institutional path dependency of recently promulgated land policy and laws.
Thanks to funding received by IFRA and other French Institutions, Francesca could realize 18-month fieldwork following first-hand the making of land law reform. She collaborated closely with Kenyan NGOs and other IFRA’s historical partners. Data collection culminated with the organization of a conference at IFRA premises in June 2016, where junior and senior researchers as well as practitioners of the land sector of Kenya and East Africa were convened to discuss recent land reforms in Africa (https://www.umifre.fr/c/63200).
Her doctoral dissertation eventually dissected the extent to which decolonization of property in Kenya hinges not only on political actors’ hijacking strategies intending to preserve centralized state control on land access and allocations, but also on colonial categories that reinvented customary rule and understood land access as exclusively tight to ethnic identities. Hence the study singles out the different dimension of the land politics and how these impacted land reform policy-making in Kenya.
Currently, Francesca continues her research on community land in Kenya by questioning how the reform did (or did not) impact communities’ claims on ancestral land and their redress by the Kenyan government; how far the promulgated law on community land does (or does not) reflect socio-economic realities of Kenyan rural areas; what are the local national and international stakes and implications of the legal recognition of customary land rights.
To contact her: fdimatteo{@} ifra-nairobi{dot}net
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IFRA Nairobi (January 10, 2022). Francesca di Matteo – Researcher and Deputy Director. IFRA Nairobi. Retrieved November 9, 2024 from https://doi.org/10.58079/pw28