Gendering the Political Economy of Smallholder Agriculture: A Scoping Review

Gender plays a prominent role in shaping the practices and experiences of smallholding farming households. This scoping review seeks to chart and analyze how gender is used in the existing literature on the political economy of smallholder agriculture. The aim of this review is to first identify the extent to which gender is addressed as a unit of analysis in this body of literature, and second, to identify when and how gender is incorporated in this body of literature. The limited work on this topic may be due to a variety of factors, the most notable of which is the failure of political economy literature to attend to the small scale and the limited attention paid to the social dynamics of women and men in farming households. Classical political economy frameworks tend to dismiss micro-processes and trends in favor of macro-structural conditions. Included articles approach gender in two distinct ways: empirical (which frames gender as a binary unit of analysis, i.e., man–woman) and analytic (a construction that operates in different ways in different contexts). This review provides a nuanced understanding of how gendered identities produce and are produced by political economy, and how political economy shapes and is shaped by gender and household dynamics.

[1]  L. Rickards,et al.  The “Gender Agenda” in Agriculture for Development and Its (Lack of) Alignment With Feminist Scholarship , 2021, Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.

[2]  L. Fonjong,et al.  Plantations, women, and food security in Africa: Interrogating the investment pathway towards zero hunger in Cameroon and Ghana , 2021, World Development.

[3]  D. Ankrah,et al.  Gendered access to productive resources – evidence from small holder farmers in Awutu Senya West District of Ghana , 2020 .

[4]  M. Koch,et al.  In search of a political economy of the postgrowth era , 2020, Globalizations.

[5]  Kaitlyn Spangler,et al.  Renegotiating gender roles and cultivation practices in the Nepali mid-hills: unpacking the feminization of agriculture , 2020 .

[6]  J. Monks,et al.  Food Security and Asset Creation in Solomon Islands: Gender and the Political Economy of Agricultural Production for Honiara Central Market , 2019, PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies.

[7]  M. Thompson.  Cultivating ‘new’ gendered food producers: intersections of power and identity in the postcolonial nation of Trinidad , 2019, Review of International Political Economy.

[8]  E. Sulle,et al.  Gender, politics and sugarcane commercialisation in Tanzania , 2019, The Journal of Peasant Studies.

[9]  Eleni Sifaki.  Women's Work and Agency in GPNS during Economic Crises: The Case of the Greek Table Grapes Export Sector , 2019, Feminist Economics.

[10]  C. Sachs.  Gender, agriculture and agrarian transformations , 2019, Gender, Agriculture and Agrarian Transformations.

[11]  Talip Kilic,et al.  Dynamics of Off-Farm Employment in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Gender Perspective , 2018, World Development.

[12]  R. Connelly,et al.  Stuck in the Middle: Off-Farm Employment and Caregiving Among Middle-Aged Rural Chinese , 2018 .

[13]  V. Uzokwe,et al.  Mapping cassava food value chains in Tanzania's smallholder farming sector: The implications of intra-household gender dynamics , 2018 .

[14]  Hanson Nyantakyi-Frimpong.  Agricultural diversification and dietary diversity: A feminist political ecology of the everyday experiences of landless and smallholder households in northern Ghana , 2017 .

[15]  Leah H. Samberg,et al.  Smallholder Agriculture and Climate Change , 2017 .

[16]  A. Gyau,et al.  Contracting and gender equity in Tanzania: using a value chain approach to understand the role of gender in organic spice certification , 2017, Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems.

[17]  M. Mbilinyi.  Analysing the history of agrarian struggles in Tanzania from a feminist perspective , 2016 .

[18]  J. Dürr.  The political economy of agriculture for development today: the “small versus large” scale debate revisited , 2016 .

[19]  J. Kinyangi,et al.  Understanding gender dimensions of agriculture and climate change in smallholder farming communities , 2016 .

[20]  P. Kantor,et al.  Amplifying Outcomes by Addressing Inequality: The Role of Gender-transformative Approaches in Agricultural Research for Development , 2015 .

[21]  R. Kasim,et al.  Positivist and Non-Positivist Paradigm in Social Science Research: Conflicting Paradigms or Perfect Partners? , 2014 .

[22]  R. Meinzen-Dick,et al.  Closing the Gender Asset Gap: Learning from Value Chain Development in Africa and Asia , 2014 .

[23]  L. Bowleg,et al.  The problem with the phrase women and minorities: intersectionality-an important theoretical framework for public health. , 2012, American journal of public health.

[24]  Kathryn Hill,et al.  The gender dimension of the agrarian transition: women, men and livelihood diversification in two peri-urban farming communities in the Philippines , 2009 .

[25]  S. Razavi.  Engendering the political economy of agrarian change , 2009 .

[26]  Zhang Lixin,et al.  Gender, Land and Local Heterogeneity , 2006 .

[27]  Spike V. Peterson,et al.  How (the meaning of) gender matters in political economy , 2005 .

[28]  H. Arksey,et al.  Scoping studies: towards a methodological framework , 2005 .

[29]  C. D. Deere.  What difference does gender make? Rethinking peasant studies , 1995 .

[30]  F. Mackenzie,et al.  Exploring the connections: Structural adjustment, gender and the environment , 1993 .

[31]  B. Harriss.  Differential female mortality and health care in South Asia. , 1989, The Journal of social studies.

[32]  C. Allison.  Women, land, labour and survival: getting some basic facts straight , 1985 .

[33]  Yihong Gao.  Legitimacy of Foreign Language Learning and Identity Research : Structuralist and Constructivist Perspectives , 2008 .

[34]  L. Jarosz.  Feminist Political Ecology , 2001 .

[35]  N. Argent.  Inside the black box: Dimensions of gender, generation and scale in the Australian rural restructuring process , 1999 .