Engendering the political economy of agrarian change

Abstract

Over the past thirty odd years, the analysis of agrarian social relations, institutions, and movements has benefited from the insights offered by feminist scholars whose intellectual project has been to bring into the political economy of agrarian change the pervasiveness of gender relations and their interconnections with broader processes of social change. The implications of this re-thinking are potentially radical. Gender analysis has interrogated some of the dominant orthodoxies in agrarian studies: in conceptualising households and their connections to broader economic and political structures; in deepening the analysis of rural markets as social and political constructions with highly unequalising tendencies; and in better understanding both the role and the limitations of different institutional arrangements (involving states, markets, and ‘communities’) for the management of local resources. However, the complexities of this research have been sanitised and distorted by neoclassical economists and powerful development organisations that speak the same language, as well as by some advocates keen to get their messages heard as they push for policy change, or alternatively ignored and sidelined by some of the political economists of agrarian change. In this paper I attempt to show some of the key contributions of feminist scholarship to agrarian studies, the extent to which these have been taken up by mainstream debates – whether neoclassical or political economy – and where there is scope for more empirical and theoretical work.

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