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.
•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.
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.
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.
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.
African women farmers are less likely than men to adopt improved crop varieties and management systems. This paper addresses two issues: How does gender affect technology adoption among African ...farmers? How does the introduction of new technologies affect women's well-being? Three conclusions come out of an extensive and critical review of the literature. First, African households are complex and heterogeneous. Second, gender roles within African households and communities cannot be simply summarized. Third, gender roles and responsibilities are dynamic; they respond to changing economic circumstances. The paper demonstrates the complexity and importance of efforts to design interventions for African women.
Is there a gender asset gap? This article examines the evidence available on the distribution of wealth by gender around the world and asks why we do not know more. One of the contributions of ...feminist economics has been to demonstrate that household and individual welfare are not necessarily the same. However, relatively little work has been done that disaggregates the ownership of assets within the household to determine how asset distribution affects the gendered pattern of wealth ownership overall or how it impacts household decisions and women's well-being. As an initial step in this project, a number of factors are examined that affect women's ability to accumulate wealth, with emphasis on marital and inheritance regimes. Finally, the myriad ways in which the gender distribution of wealth is important are discussed.
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