Should agricultural development programmes target women in order to increase productivity? This article analyzes the challenges in distinguishing women's agricultural productivity from that of men. ...Most of the literature compares productivity on plots managed by women with those managed by men, ignoring the majority of agricultural households in which men and women are both involved in management and production. The empirical studies which have been carried out provide scant evidence for where the returns to projects may be highest, in terms of who to target. Yet, programmes that do not consider gendered responsibilities, resources and constraints, are unlikely to succeed, either in terms of increasing productivity or benefitting men and women smallholder farmers.
Many key development outcomes depend on women s ability to negotiate favorable intrahousehold allocations of resources. Yet it has been difficult to clearly identify which policies can increase ...women's bargaining power and result in better outcomes. This paper reviews both the analytical frameworks and the empirical evidence on the importance of women's bargaining power. It argues that there is sufficient evidence from rigorous studies to conclude that women's bargaining power does affect outcomes. But in many specific instances, the quantitative evidence cannot rigorously identify causality. In these cases, a combination of quantitative and qualitative evidence may suggest policy levers. Taken together, there are sufficient data in place to support a greatly expanded focus on intrahousehold outcomes and bargaining power. Additional data at the individual level will allow for further and more detailed research. A growing literature supports the current conventional wisdom -- namely, that the patterns of evidence suggest that women s education, incomes, and assets all are important aspects of women s bargaining power.
•Frames household as engaged in collective action to understand decision-making.•Applies Institutional Analysis and Development Framework to collective action in households.•Draws on lessons from ...natural resource management literature.•Moves away from bargaining or unitary models of households.•Both literatures should explicitly consider power relationships.
Households face many collective action situations, with members working together to produce livelihoods and allocate goods. But neither unitary nor bargaining models of the household provide frameworks to analyze the conditions under which households work collectively and when they fail to do so. Drawing on the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework based in the natural resource management literature, this paper explores the factors that encourage and inhibit collective action and provides insights into how to understand collective action problems within the household as dynamic, multi-actor situations with outcomes that can be evaluated by multiple criteria, not just efficiency.
Over the past thirty years, feminist economists have been at the forefront of work on household and intrahousehold economics. To a significant degree, their work has entered mainstream economics. ...This is surely a success story, both in the impact on academia and the broader implications for policy. This essay suggests that feminist economists should pause to reflect on the potential perils that accompany these successes. What gets lost when intrahousehold issues are folded into mainstream economic analyses? What is still missing in this literature? What still needs to be on the agenda for feminist economists working on issues around households? The essay highlights five potential perils: the focus on individuals, the narrow definition of households, the tendency for questions to be driven by available data and metrics, the possibility of collecting more data than scholars can use, and the need to include social norms and structural constraints.
HIGHLIGHTS
Feminist economists have advanced the frontiers of household economics.
Innovations in data collection help us understand women's asset ownership and decision making.
Women's voices are increasingly captured in data collection.
Mainstream approaches continue to focus on individuals and to define households narrowly.
Much mainstream research still struggles to include social norms and structural constraints.
Rapidly growing demand for agricultural land is putting pressure on property-rights systems, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, where customary tenure systems have provided secure land access. Rapid ...and large-scale demands from outsiders are challenging patterns of gradual, endogenous change toward formalization. Little attention has focused on the gender dimensions of this transformation. However this contribution, based on a 2008-09 study of land tenure in Uganda, analyzes how different definitions of land ownership - including household reports, existence of ownership documents, and rights over the land - provide very different indications of the gendered patterns of land ownership and rights. While many households report husbands and wives as joint owners of the land, women are less likely to be listed on ownership documents, and have fewer rights. A simplistic focus on "title" to land misses much of the reality regarding land tenure and could have an adverse impact on women's land rights.
Lack of clarity behind measurement and interpretation of statistics on gender and land leads to an inability to clearly articulate a policy response to the potential inequalities faced by women and ...men. This article sets out to explore, conceptually and empirically, the levels and relative inequalities in land rights between women and men in African countries. The first section of the article engages in a conceptual discussion of how to measure gendered‐land outcomes, what ownership and control mean in different contexts, and why attention to these factors is important for the development of gender and land statistics. The second section of the article systematically reviews existing evidence from microlevel large sample studies to summarize recent trends in land access, ownership, and control by sex. The third section presents new statistics from a variety of nationally representative and large‐scale unpublished data on gender and land in Africa. Results provide not only a nuanced understanding of the importance of measuring land indicators for gendered development in Africa and globally but also new statistics on a variety of land outcomes to aid stakeholders in the discussion of gender‐land inequalities.
New data and new methods have provided many new insights into rural households in the past 50 years. We analyze what we have learned from household models since Boserup and Becker, using this to ...frame more recent findings about household behavior from three types of studies: observational studies, experimental games, and impact evaluations. More sex‐disaggregated data, as well as data that are collected at smaller units, such as agricultural plots, have allowed us to better understand agricultural productivity, risk sharing, and spousal cooperation. However, the focus on bargaining within households has often led us to ignore the cooperation that occurs within households. Many resources are owned and managed jointly by household members and many decisions are made jointly, although not all parties necessarily have equal voice in these decisions. Research demonstrating that households often do not reach efficient outcomes suggests that we still have much to learn about rural household behavior. Understanding both individual roles within households and the levels of cooperation, including joint decision making and ownership of resources, is essential to analysis of households, especially in rural areas where households engage in both production and consumption.
Assets generate and help diversify income, alleviate liquidity constraints, and are key inputs into empowerment. Despite the importance of individual-level data on asset ownership, and the fact that ...most assets are owned by individuals, either solely or jointly, researchers typically collect micro data on asset ownership at the household level. Through a review of the existing approaches to data collection and the relevant literature on survey methodology, this study presents an overview of the current best practices for collecting individual-level data on the ownership and control of assets in household and farm surveys in low- and middle-income countries. The paper provides recommendations in three areas: (1) respondent selection, (2) definition and measurement of access to and ownership and control of assets, and (3) measurement of quantity, value, and quality of assets. It identifies open methodological questions that can be answered through further research.
Policy makers and interest groups have many questions about the use of improved technologies in developing country agriculture. These include the roles of policies, institutions, and infrastructure ...in the adoption of improved technologies and their impact on productivity and welfare. Most micro‐level adoption studies, however, cannot address these important policy issues. Drawing on an extensive review of the literature on the adoption of agricultural technologies, this article suggests alternative approaches for designing technology adoption studies to make them useful for policy makers. It explores the generic limitations of cross‐sectional adoption studies carried out in small numbers of communities and discusses some problems faced in conducting such studies. Recommendations include the use of sampling approaches that allow data from microstudies to be generalized to higher levels of aggregation, adherence to clearly defined terms that are standardized across studies, and careful examination of the assumptions that often underlie such studies.
•Combining qualitative and quantitative methods sheds new light on women's empowerment processes.•Upper caste Nepali women are disempowered by patriarchy; lower caste women by poverty and ...patriarchy.•Non-migrant husbands mediate the disempowering effects of living with in-laws.•Control over time, not just hours worked, is an important component of empowerment.
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