Bina Agarwal

Participatory Exclusions, Community Forestry, and Gender: An Analysis for South Asia and a Conceptual Framework

Abstract The idea of peoples participation has long been part of development thinking. But today the management of local natural resources by village communities is widely accepted as an institutional imperative. It is therefore essential to examine how these institutions perform, especially from the perspective of the more disadvantaged. Based on extensive fieldwork among community forestry groups in India and Nepal, and existing case studies, this paper demonstrates how seemingly participatory institutions can exclude significant sections, such as women. It provides a typology of participation, spells out the gender equity and efficiency implications of such exclusions, and analyzes what underlies them. It also outlines a conceptual framework to help analyze the process of gender exclusion and how it might be alleviated.

Gender and Land Rights Revisited: Exploring New Prospects via the State, Family and Market

The question of women’s land rights has a relatively young history in India. This paper briefly traces that history before examining why gendering the land question remains critical, and what the new possibilities are for enhancing women’s land access. Potentially, women can obtain land through the State, the family and the market. The paper explores the prospects and constraints linked to each, arguing that access through the family and the market deserve particular attention, since most arable land in India is privatized. On market access, the paper makes several departures from existing discussions by focusing on the advantages, especially for poor women, of working in groups to lease in or purchase land; using government credit for land rather than merely for micro-enterprises; and collectively managing purchased or leased in land, the collectivity being constituted with other women, rather than with family members. Such group functioning is shown to have several advantages over individual or family-based farming. This approach could also help revive land reform, community cooperation and joint farming in a radically new form, one centred on poor women.

Environmental Action, Gender Equity and Women's Participation

For poor households, and especially for the women who own little private land, forests and village commons have always been critical sources of basic necessities in rural India. However, the availability of these resources has been declining rapidly, due both to degradation and to shifts in property rights away from community control and management to State and individual control and management. More recently, though, we are seeing small but notable reversals in these processes toward a re-establishment of greater community control over forests and village commons. Numerous forest management groups have emerged, initiated variously by the State, by village communities, or by non-governmental organizations. However, unlike the old systems of communal property management which recognized the usufruct rights of all villagers, the new ones represent a more formalized system of rights based on membership. In other words, under the new initiatives, membership is replacing citizenship as the defining criterion for establishing rights in the commons. This raises critical questions about participation and equity, especially gender equity. Are the benefits and costs of the emergent institutional arrangements being shared equally by women and men? Or are they creating a system of property rights in communal land which, like existing rights in privatized land, are strongly male centred? What is womens participation in these initiatives? What constrains or facilitates their participation and exercise of agency? This article provides pointers. It also demonstrates the relevance of the feminist environmentalist perspective, as opposed to the ecofeminist perspective, in understanding gendered responses to the environmental crisis.

Gender and Command Over Property: A Critical Gap in Economic Analysis and Policy in South Asia

Abstract This paper focuses on a much neglected issue: the links between gender inequities and command over property. It outlines why in rural South Asia, where arable land is the most important form of property, any significant improvement in womens economic and social situation is crucially tied to their having independent land rights. Better employment opportunities can complement but not substitute for land. But despite progressive legislation few South Asian women own land; even fewer effectively control any. Why? A complex range of factors — social, administrative, and ideological — are found to underlie the persistent gap between womens legal rights and their actual ownership of land, and between ownership and control. The necessity of collective action by women for overcoming these obstacles and the aspects needing a specific focus for policy and action are also discussed.

Women, poverty and agricultural growth in India

This article explores the interlinkages between gender, poverty and agricultural growth in India. It shows how women and female children of poor rural households bear a disproportionately high share of the burden of poverty. This is manifest especially in a systematic bias against females in the intra‐household distribution of food and health care. However, there are significant cross‐regional differences in the extent of the bias which is much higher in the north‐western states relative to the southern. Some of the likely factors ‐ economic, social, historical ‐ underlying these differences are discussed here. The specific problems of female‐headed households are separately considered. Also, the on‐going debate on the relationship between rural poverty and agricultural growth is critically examined. In addition, a detailed quantitative analysis is undertaken of the differential effects of the new agricultural technology, and associated growth, on the employment and earnings of female and male agricultura...

Diffusion of rural innovations: Some analytical issues and the case of wood-burning stoves

Abstract The literature on the diffusion of rural innovations in Third World countries reveals a spectrum of approaches to the diffusion process. It is argued here that the effectiveness of a particular approach in the diffusion of particular innovations would depend on the technical, the economic and the social characteristics of the innovations. A typology of innovations in terms of these characteristics has been drawn up. This provides the analytical framework within which the instance of wood-burning stoves is concerned. A priori, the characteristics of this innovation are seen to be such as to necessitate the close involvement of the users in the design process itself; they point to the likely inappropriateness of the usual ‘top-down’ approach to diffusion. Available evidence relating to actual experience with promoting wood-burning stoves is seen to bear this out.

Food sovereignty, food security and democratic choice: critical contradictions, difficult conciliations

In recent years, the concept of ‘food sovereignty’ has gained increasing ground among grassroots groups, taking the form of a global movement. But there is no uniform conceptualization of what food sovereignty constitutes. Indeed, the definition has been expanding over time. It has moved from its initial focus on national self-sufficiency in food production (‘the right of nations’) to local self-sufficiency (‘the rights of peoples’). There is also a growing emphasis on the rights of women and other disadvantaged groups, and on consensus building and democratic choice. This paper provides a critique of some of the major tenets of the food sovereignty movement. It recognizes that many developing countries may wish to pursue the goal of self-sufficiency in the context of the global food crises, and that it is important to promote social equality and democratic choice. Taken together, however, there can be serious contradictions between the key features of the food sovereignty vision, such as between the goals of national and local food self-sufficiency; between promoting food crops and a farmers freedom to choose to what extent to farm, which crops to grow, and how to grow them; between strengthening family farming and achieving gender equality; and between collective and individual rights, especially over land ownership. The paper also reflects on the ways in which some of the food sovereignty goals could be better achieved through innovative institutional change, without sacrificing an individuals freedom to choose.

Gender, environment, and poverty interlinks: Regional variations and temporal shifts in rural India, 1971-1991

Summary. - This paper analyzes the interrelationships between gender, poverty and the environment in rural India, focusing especially on regional variations and temporal shifts over 197 1-9 1. Briefly identifying the major factors underlying environmental degradation, it traces why and how this degradation, and the appropriation of natural resources by the state (statization) and by some individuals (privatization), tend to have particularly adverse implications for the female members of poor rural households. Regional and temporal variations in the likely intensity of these effects are traced both by examining individual indicators and through the specification of a set of aggregative indices, termed here as the GEP(V) indices. These indices measure differences between states in their gender-environment-poverty vulnerability (or what could be termed the “GEP-gap”) at a point in time, and over time. Governmental and community-initiated attempts at environmental protection and regeneration are also examined, and the importance of gender-directed policies highlighted. Copyright 0 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd

CONTINUING THE CONVERSATION

AS: My interest in inequality, which goes back to my school days, was initially quite fixed on class divisions. My involvement with gender inequality grew more slowly. There was much greater concentration on class in standard politics (including standard student politics), and when in the early 1950s I was studying at Presidency College in Calcutta, it was taken for granted that class divisions were incomparably more important than other social divisions. Indeed, when later on, in the late 1960s, I started working on gender inequality (I was then teaching at Delhi University), many of my close friends still saw this as quite an ‘‘unsound’’ broadening of interest, involving a ‘‘dilution’’ of one’s ‘‘focus on class.’’ But, in addition to that political issue of priority, it is also true that classbased inequalities are, in many ways, much more transparent, which no one – even a child – can miss, without closing one’s eyes altogether. Even my sense of agony and outrage at the Great Bengal famine of 1943, to which you refer (and which did strongly shake even my 9-year-old mind), was also linked to the class pattern of mortality. Aside from the anger and outrage at the fact that millions could actually die of hunger and hunger-related diseases, I was amazed by the extraordinary recognition that no one I knew personally, through family connections or social ones, had any serious economic problem during the famine, while unknown millions, men, women, and children, roamed the country in search of food and fell and perished. The class character of famines in particular and of economic deprivation in general was impossible to escape. There was, of course, evidence of inequality between men and women as well. But its severe and brutal manifestations (on which I researched much later – from the late 1960s to the 1990s) were well hidden from immediate observation. And the less extreme expressions were confounded by a prevailing attitudinal fog. For example, in comparison with Feminist Economics 9(2 – 3), 2003, 319 – 332

Toward Freedom from Domestic Violence: The Neglected Obvious

Freedom is a key concept in Amartya Sens definitions of capabilities and development. This paper focuses on a serious and neglected form of unfreedom — domestic violence — and argues that freedom from such violence must be integral to evaluating developmental progress. Conceptually, it notes that a persons well‐being can depend not only on absolute measures of capabilities and functionings but also on relative capabilities and functionings within families; and this can even lead to perverse effects. A man married to a woman better employed than himself, for instance, may be irked by her higher achievement and physically abuse her, thus reducing her well‐being achievement (e.g. by undermining her health) and her well‐being freedom (e.g. by reducing her work mobility or social interaction). Empirically the paper focuses especially on a hitherto unexplored factor — a womans property status — and demonstrates that owning a house or land significantly reduces her risk of marital violence. Employment, by contrast, unless it is regular, makes little difference. Immovable property provides a woman economic and physical security, enhances her self‐esteem, and visibly signals the strength of her fall‐back position and tangible exit option. It can both deter violence and provide an escape if violence occurs. Also unlike employment, property ownership is not found to be associated with perverse outcomes, in that a propertied woman married to a propertyless man is not subject to greater violence.