Tuesday, 13 June 2023, 13h00 – 14h30 CAT
Please join us for a public lecture by Professor Bina Agarwal from the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester in the United Kingdom who will be talking about ‘Obstacles to women’s land rights and ways forward: Insights from India and beyond’.
Abstract
Globally, for many decades (sometimes even a century) rural women have been struggling for gender equality in land rights, both in law and in practice. While many countries have moved towards legal equality, a vast gap persists between law and practice, be it in Asia, Africa or Latin America. This raises some key questions: what is the extent of this gap? What factors underlie it? And what can be done to bridge it? Moreover, how do female owners perform in terms of farm productivity relative to male owners? Should we be thinking of more group (as vs. individual) approaches to women gaining access to land and cultivating it?
In a wide-ranging analysis, Professor Bina Agarwal poses these questions and provides answers, based on her pioneering historical and contemporary empirical work in India, and its potential lessons for other regions.
Seminar details
Date: 13 June 2023
Platform: Online
Time: 13:00 – 14:30 Central African Time (CAT)
The seminar will be facilitated by Prof Ruth Hall. Professor Ruth Hall holds the South African Research Chair in Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, which is funded by the National Research Foundation. The Chair is located at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape.
Bina Agarwal
Professor of Development Economics and Environment
Bina Agarwal is a Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, UK. Prior to this she was Director and Professor at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. She has been President of the International Society for Ecological Economics; President of the International Association for Feminist Economics; and visiting professor at Cambridge, Harvard, and Princeton. She holds several honorary doctorates.
Her over 100 academic papers and 13 books, include the award-winning book: A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (Cambridge University Press 1994); Gender and Green Governance (OUP, 2010) and Gender Challenges (OUP, 2016), a three-volume compendium of her selected papers. Her pioneering work on gender and land rights and on environmental governance has had global impact. In 2005 she led a successful civil society campaign to make India’s Hindu Inheritance law gender equal. She is currently working on group farming in Asia and Europe.
Agarwal’s awards include a Padma Shri from India’s President; several book prizes; the Leontief Prize ‘for advancing the frontiers of economic thought’; the Louis Malassis International Scientist Prize for ‘an outstanding career in agricultural development,’ and the International Balzan Prize 2017. She is only the second woman from the Global South to win the Balzan prize since its inception in 1961. See also, www.binaagarwal.com.
