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In international research and development discourses, the 'Feminization of Agriculture' is often used as a vague umbrella term referring to an increase in women's labor burden and responsibilities in agriculture as a result of male out-migration. However, the term is under-conceptualized, and fails to reflect changing gender relations in agriculture and natural resource management, with the potential consequence of ill-defined agriculture and gender research programs. This paper challenges narratives of the 'Feminization of Agriculture'. Drawing from feminist political ecology, this paper conceptualizes gender relations more broadly by highlighting gendered subjectivities and power relations in agriculture in contexts of male out-migration. I propose a conceptual framework to explore shifts in (1) socio-spatial struggles over resources, (2) influence within agrarian households and communal spaces, (3) aspirations, feelings of insecurity and self-determination. I build on extensive participatory fieldwork conducted in three countries, Nepal, India and Bangladesh. The conceptual framework helps analyze how some gender norms and relations are renegotiated in contexts of male out-migration. While unequal power relations shape everyday struggles in agriculture and natural resource management, for some women, increased mobility, social engagement and handling cash create new spaces to influence, move, and communicate. Importantly, everyday struggles over agricultural, water and land resources remain shaped by gender, age, caste, land ownership, remittances and household position, particularly those living with the family in-laws. Research and development programs need to take intersectionality into account and explore emerging spaces for influence, but also be aware of persistent gender norms and power relations which shape agricultural practices, aspirations and self-determination. I conclude by arguing for the need to expand the 'Feminization of Agriculture' debate towards a broader understanding of socio-spatial change and gendered subjectivities within agriculture. • The term 'Feminization of Agriculture' is under-conceptualized, and fails to reflect changing gender relations in agriculture and natural resource management. • A conceptual framework drawing from feminist political ecology frames gender relations more broadly and highlights gendered subjectivities and power relations in agriculture in contexts of male out-migration. • The conceptual framework explores shifts in (1) socio-spatial struggles over resources, (2) influence within agrarian households and communal spaces, (3) aspirations, feelings of insecurity and self-determination. • This paper challenges narratives of the 'Feminization of Agriculture' by arguing for the need to expand the 'Feminization of Agriculture' debate towards a broader understanding of socio-spatial change and gendered subjectivities within agriculture. • Research and development programs need to take intersectionality into account and be aware of persistent gender norms and power relations which shape agricultural practices, aspirations and self-determination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Property is widely recognized as an important resource for empowering women. Many development policies worldwide therefore call for strengthening women's rights to property, especially to physical assets such as land and livestock. However, the relationship between property and women's empowerment is more complex than generally assumed because of the overlapping and dynamic nature of property rights. In this paper, we explore how property rights affect the empowerment of women at different stages of the life cycle and different social locations, ethnicities, household structures, and social classes, using the lens of intersectionality. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted for the "Evaluation of the Welfare Impacts of a Livestock Transfer Program in Nepal," we examine patterns in women's strategies to exercise specific rights over joint and personal property within their households. The findings show that legal categories of property rights in Nepal fail to account for nuanced rights to assets shared within households. Rather than emphasize individual control over assets for women's empowerment, the social relations around property need to be considered to understand which rights women value. The paper makes recommendations for how research and development projects, especially in South Asia, can avoid misinterpreting asset and empowerment data by incorporating nuance around the concepts of property rights over the life cycle. • Women's joint and personal property rights in practice differ from legal definitions. • Household structure and relations with household members influence property rights. • Daughters-in-law in joint households have weaker joint and personal property rights. • Strategies to claim joint or personal property rights change over the life cycle. • Women's empowerment programs need to account for the social relations of property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• It is critical to theorize equity in the context of equitable resilience. • Predefined visions of equity and transformative change hide contextual and intersectional agencies and experiences of risk. • In Jumla, Nepal, state-led interventions define equity as "equal distribution" that do not acknowledge social differences such as caste and gender. • Yet, focusing on caste and gender as indicators of marginalization also overlook contextual and dynamic influences on risk. • Equitable resilience requires recognizing intersectional inequalities and local agency, not predefined indicators of risk and vulnerability. Equitable resilience is an increasing focus of development policy, but there is still insufficient attention to how the framings of equity itself shape what, and who, is targeted through development efforts. Universalistic assumptions about climate risk or social marginalization can define equity in ways that hide dynamic and intersectional influences on what constitutes risk to whom under different circumstances. This paper investigates the implications of two different equity framings for resilience in Jumla District, western Nepal. Drawing on more than one hundred household surveys plus in-depth qualitative interviews in six villages, we find that state-led efforts to present post-civil war development as the "equal distribution" of roads and infrastructure, agricultural commercialization, and protection against systemic climate risk fail to reflect local experiences of risk, which are often expressed in terms of social exclusion rather than vulnerability to climate change. Yet, simultaneously, other efforts at building resilience that use caste and gender as indicators of social marginalization overlook how transitions in livelihoods and individual agency have changed vulnerability contexts for many people, or the increasing vulnerability to climate change of more landed farmers. The paper urges more critical attention to how normative framings of equity shape what, and for whom is considered equitable resilience, including assumptions about transformative change from analysts themselves. Representing risks and vulnerability in terms of socially marginalized groups alone might deny the dynamic, intersectional, and contextual interconnection of risks and social agency; and might impose unhelpful subjectivities of their own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We analyse how TLM changes property rights, livelihoods and landscapes. • Remittances help households to cope with shocks and support livelihoods. • TLM can produce important agrarian-environmental changes. • However, TLM ultimately fails to transform entrenched structural inequalities. • Advance the rights of migrants and enhance state support to improve TLM outcomes. While scholars and policy makers have increasingly focused on transnational labour migration (TLM) in Asia, few comparative studies have analysed how TLM shapes poverty, livelihoods, vulnerability, and agrarian-forest change across different rural contexts. Based on focused comparative fieldwork and a critical review of the secondary literature, this paper identifies the salient patterns of TLM-led change affecting rural livelihoods and agrarian-forest landscapes in three migrant-sending Asian countries: Nepal, Indonesia and Laos. Depending on how social relations, including those based on gender and ethnicity, and how specific geographic places are integrated into migration pathways, TLM can result in patterns of changes involving agricultural deactivation and de-agrarianisation, as well as incipient re-agrarianisation. We also find that where remittances are integrated with diversified livelihood portfolios, and where state policies play a supportive role, transnational labour migration may improve household livelihoods. In the absence of these factors, the transformative potential of TLM can be overestimated, and TLM may end up reproducing underlying structural drivers of rural poverty and vulnerability. We, therefore, challenge the simplistic narrative that TLM provides an easy solution to the limitations of rural development in agrarian Asia. We suggest policy innovations that ameliorate critical issues of migrant vulnerability and precarity, and that support the mobilisation of labour remittances for agricultural development and livelihood diversification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food literacy among children and youth is configured by two knowledge domains: an informal community-based knowledge, and a formal curriculum-based knowledge. This paper examines how these two domains contribute to food literacy and strengthen food security among rural youth in Nepal. In consultation with schoolteachers and local farmers, a knowledge test was developed and administered to 226 high school students. Scores were collected on agro-ecological, cultivation and consumption-related knowledge on a locally grown staple crop, as contributor to food literacy. Sociocultural factors like age, gender, level of education, migration of household members, level of student interest, and spatial factor like location of school all have an influence on food literacy. While formal school-based education and community-based informal knowledge oppositely interact, there is space for these two domains to synergistically interact to enhance food literacy. Rural students have potential to enhance food literacy in the schools, provided the schools create supportive space for experiential learning that weaves community-based Indigenous knowledges of local foods. However, an effective promotion of food literacy can only be ensured by adopting a holistic approach that includes a wide range of actors such as students, parents, teachers, schools, community organizations and government institutions. • Food literacy is configured by two knowledge domains: formal and informal, contributing to food literacy among rural youths. • Rural students have potential to enhance food literacy in the schools through experiential learning. • Retention of knowledge is the outcome of a complex interaction of gender with other intersectionalities. • Effective promotion of food literacy needs a holistic approach where all relevant stakeholders have a role to play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Widespread male out-migration presents major challenges to the sustainability of existing collective irrigation systems. However, the effects of socio-spatial changes on collective resource governance systems remain unknown. This paper addresses this gap by building a synthesis of translocality and Feminist Political Ecology (FPE). Translocality examines the socio-spatial interconnectedness of rural societies in the context of out-migration. FPE explores how changing gender and social relations shape resource governance. A translocal Feminist Political Ecology framework (tFPE) contextualizes resource governance within translocal social flows, and captures (i) translocal resource governance, (ii) translocal social relations, and (iii) translocal aspirations. Drawing from qualitative interviews and participatory methods on two farmer-managed irrigation systems in Far Western Nepal, I illustrate the complexity, intersectionality and ambiguity of translocal social relations in collective resource governance. Translocal resource governance is shaped by changing household and labor relations marked by remittances, and translocal flows of social and human resources, ideas and knowledge, e.g. migrants' advice via phone on when and how to irrigate. Translocal social relations entail marginalized groups, i.e., women and elderly people, providing increased labor contributions and possibly receiving migrants' support in the form of advice and networks. However, authority and power relations are sustained in resource governance by mostly upper caste men. Translocal aspirations to the home village by both migrants and non-migrants is ambivalent and leads them to hope for frequent visits home, while aspirations and shame turn them away from agriculture towards earning higher incomes through migration. The tFPE framework emphasizes important but understudied translocal social relations and aspirations in collective resource governance, water, irrigation and migration research. By linking translocality and FPE, I show how translocal resource governance, social relations and aspirations change everyday practices and gender, caste and labor relations in irrigation, and how we may understand the water-migration nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: One way of reducing maternal mortality in developing countries is to ensure that women have a referral system at the local level that includes access to emergency obstetric care. Using a 13-month ethnographic study from 2003 to 2005 of women’s social positions and maternal health in a semi-urban community of Hindu-caste women in the Kathmandu Valley, this paper identifies impediments to receiving obstetric care in a context where the infrastructure and services are in place. As birth in Nepal predominantly takes place at home, this paper identifies the following areas for potential improvement in order to avoid the loss of women’s lives during childbirth: the frequency of giving birth unaided, minimal planning for birth or obstetric complications, and delayed responses at the household level to obstetric emergencies. Focusing particularly on the last item, this study concludes that women do not have the power to demand biomedical services or emergency care, and men still viewed birth as the domain of women and remained mostly uninvolved in the process. As the cultural construction of birth shifts from a “natural” phenomenon that did not require human regulation toward one that is located within the domain of biomedical expertise and control, local acceptance of a biomedical model does not necessarily lead to the utilization of services if neither women nor men are in a culturally-defined position to act. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• We evaluate the impact of a value chain development project on agricultural productivity focusing on differences by gender and ethnicity. • We decompose the impact by ethnicity and by gender. • The project impact is higher for non-minority and male-headed households than for ethnic minority and female-headed households. • Results suggest that the agricultural productivity gap by ethnicity and by gender is mainly driven by endowment effects, primarily land and labor endowments. • Findings highlight the need for targeted support to minority and female producers in value chain development projects. This paper estimates the impact of an inclusive agricultural value chain development project on agricultural productivity and decomposes the impact by gender and ethnicity of producers. The intervention sought to alleviate poverty among small-scale producers by increasing agricultural productivity and lowering transaction costs. It also specifically targeted minority and female producers to ensure inclusivity. We use primary survey data from over 2,500 households in rural Nepal. We estimate the impact on agricultural productivity by employing a treatment effect estimator, and decompose it by gender and ethnicity using the Kitagawa-Oaxaca-Blinder (KOB) decomposition method. We find that the project has a positive impact on agricultural productivity, but the impact is higher for non-minority and male-headed households than for minority and female-headed households, respectively. The ethnicity productivity gap is smaller in the treatment group than in comparison group. Even though male-headed households have consistently higher productivity, the gender gap in agricultural productivity is smaller in the treatment group compared to the comparison group. KOB decomposition shows that the ethnicity- and gender- specific differential impacts are mainly driven by differential endowment effects, primarily land and labor endowments. Results suggest that the project reduced the ethnicity- and gender-specific productivity gaps, although it did not eliminate them entirely. These findings highlight the need for targeted support to vulnerable producers including ethnic minority and female producers. Specifically targeted land tenure security programs can ensure that vulnerable producers can harness benefits in a manner which could help narrow productivity differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Land rights equity is seen as an important tool for increasing empowerment and economic welfare for women in developing countries. Accordingly, the objective of this paper is to empirically examine the role of women’s land ownership, either alone or jointly, as a means of improving their intra-household bargaining power in the areas of own healthcare, major household purchases, and visiting family or relatives. Using the 2001 and 2011 Nepal Demographic and Health Surveys and relevant econometric techniques, we find that land ownership has a positive and significant impact on women’s empowerment. In particular, we find two important patterns of results. First, accounting for the endogeneity of land ownership with inverse probability weighting, coarsened exact matching and instrumental variable methods makes its impact on empowerment higher. Previous research in this area had largely ignored the potential endogeneity of land ownership. Second, the impact is generally stronger in 2011 than in 2001. As evidenced in a number of empirical studies, the increase in women’s bargaining power can in turn translate into a redirection of resources toward women’s preferences, including higher investment in human capital of the household such as education, health, and nutrition. Therefore, our study indicates that in places where agriculture is the main source of economy for women, policies enhancing land rights equity have the potential to increase women’s empowerment and associated beneficial welfare effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Current theorising in human geography draws attention to the relational emergence of space and society, challenging ideas of difference that rely on fixed identities and emphasising the importance of the everyday in the production of social inequalities. Similarly, feminist political ecology has emphasised the role of ‘nature’ or ‘environment’ in the production of subjectivities such that ideas of gender and nature arise in relation to each other. In this paper I build from these insights to explore the ways in which the embodied performance of gender, caste and other aspects of social difference collapse the distinction between the material and the symbolic. Symbolic ideas of difference are produced and expressed through embodied interactions that are firmly material. Through this kind of conceptualisation, I hope to push forward debates in geography on nature and feminist political ecology on how to understand the intersectional emergence of subjectivities, difference and socio-natures. Importantly, it is the symbolic meanings of particular spaces, practices and bodies that are (re)produced through everyday activities including forest harvesting, agricultural work, food preparation and consumption, all of which have consequences for both ecological processes and social difference. Through the performance of everyday tasks, not only are ideas of gender, caste and social difference brought into view, but the embodied nature of difference that extends beyond the body and into the spaces of everyday life is evident. I use ethnographic evidence from rural Nepal to explore the ways in which boundaries between bodies, spaces, ecologies and symbolic meanings of difference are produced and maintained relationally through practices of work and ritual. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: The gender and politics literature has long debated how women’s proportional strength affects policy formulation within legislatures. Studies on gender and environmental governance have focused mainly on women’s limited participation in local institutions. Both bodies of work leave important aspects unexplored. The former neglects the in-between process — the impact of women’s numbers on their effective participation, such as attending and speaking up at meetings, and holding office. The latter neglects to ask: what impact would increasing women’s proportions have on participation and what proportions are effective? Rigorous empirical analysis is also scarce. Addressing these gaps, this paper, based on primary data for community forestry institutions in India and Nepal, statistically tests if a group’s gender composition affects women’s effective participation, and if there are any critical mass effects. The results support the popularly emphasized proportions of one-quarter to one-third, but women’s economic class also matters, as do some factors other than women’s numbers. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: Women’s land rights are increasingly put forth as a means to promote development by empowering women, increasing productivity, and improving welfare. However, little empirical research has evaluated these claims. This paper uses the 2001 Nepal Demographic and Health Survey to explore whether women’s land rights empower women and benefit young children’s health in Nepal. The results provide support for both of these hypotheses. Women who own land are significantly more likely to have the final say in household decisions, a measure of empowerment. Similarly, children of mothers who own land are significantly less likely to be severely underweight. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Introduction: Women's active participation is important for inclusive water, sanitation, and hygiene (WaSH) programs, yet gender roles that limit women's access to formal education and employment may reduce their skills, experience, and capacity for implementation. This paper explores differences between men and women implementers of rural WaSH programs in implementation approaches, challenges, and sources of support for implementation, and success in achieving program quality outcomes.Methods: We interviewed 18 men and 13 women in community-based implementation roles in four districts of Nepal. We identified challenges and sources of support for implementation in four domains-informational, tangible, emotional, or companionship-following social support theory. We assessed successes at achieving intermediate implementation outcomes (e.g., adoption, appropriateness, sustainability) and long-term intervention outcomes (e.g., community cleanliness, health improvements).Results: Women used relational approaches and leveraged social ties to encourage behavior change, while men used formative research to identify behavior drivers and sanctions to drive behavior change. Women experienced stigma for working outside the home, which was perceived as a traditionally male role. Companionship and emotional support from other women and male community leaders helped mitigate stigma and lack of informational support. Women were also more likely to receive no or low financial compensation for work and had fewer opportunities for feedback and training compared to men. Despite lack of support, women were motivated to work by a desire to build their social status, gain new knowledge, and break conventional gender roles.Conclusions: Both men and women perceived that women were more effective than men at mobilizing widespread, sustained WaSH improvements, which was attributed to their successes using relational approaches and leveraging social ties to deliver acceptable and appropriate messages. Their skills for motivating collective action indicate that they can be highly effective WaSH implementers despite lack of technical experience and training, and that women's active participation is important for achieving transformative community change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]