Bina Agarwal

Bina Agarwal (born 1951, India) is a prize- winning feminist economist who studies gender, development, and agriculture in India and throughout South Asia. She focuses on the importance of land and control of land for women. Her work examines and urges political and group action for women. Agarwal writes about changing the framework of traditional economics to include women and implicit power relationships in decision making found in patriarchical societies. Her work has brought South Asia (especially India), South Asian women, and a more international perspective into the field of feminist economics.

Background

Bina Agarwal was educated at Cambridge for her masters and received her PhD from the University of Delhi in Economics.

Concepts and Areas of Focus

Agarwal writes and researches on various subjects: land, livelihoods and property rights; environment and development; the political economy of gender; poverty and inequality; law; and agriculture and technological change. She deals especially with the connectedness of gender, poverty, and development. She keeps her work mostly focused on the lives and livelihoods of those most disadvantaged by sexism, development, and class in different societies. Her work can be applied broadly but the bulk of her work deals with her home country of India. Her works, especially those concerning women and land rights, have been used to construct NGO and governmental policy. She has recently led a successful movement in India to achieve gender equality in Hindu Inheritance laws.

Agarwal’s concept of the “bargaining approach ” and cooperative conflict which rethinks economics to include implicit control in power relationships and decision making processes. The “bargaining approach” calls attention to the unequal playing field of political and social decision making especially in reference to women and the state. In her article “Bargaining and Gender Relations,” Agarwal examines how women in India were able to bargain with the State to pass the inheritance laws of 1956.

Her other noted works delve into the relationship between gender, power, and land. In her article “Marital Violence, Human Development, and Women’s Property Status in India” written with Pradeep Panda, Agarwal concludes that women’s ability to own and inherit land acts as a deterrent against marital violence. In "A Field of One’s Own", perhaps her most famous work, Agarwal again stresses the importance of land, inheritance and ownership in India, arguing “the single most important factor affecting women’s situation is the gender gap in command over property.” In another article “Home and the World: Revisiting Violence,” Agarwal and Panda charge India with dealing with marital violence “after the fact” and suggesting reforming land ownership and inheritance laws. Spurred on by Agarwal’s work, India has given into the demands of women’s groups and passed the Hindu Succession Act in 2005. This act places agricultural land as equal to all other land and gives Hindu women ownership and inheritance rights equal to the rights Hindu men have. The current focus of Agarwal’s work is Environmental Governance, Collective Action, and Gender.

Positions and Awards

Bina Agarwal is Professor of Economics at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi University. Previously she has held positions at Harvard (the first Daniel Ingalls Visiting Professor), University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), and was the Winton Chair at the University of Minnesota. Outside of academia she was Vice President of the International Economic Association and was President of the International Association for Feminist Economics. Agarwal also is a founding member of the Indian Society for Ecological Economics and serves on the board for the Global Development Network. She has also acted as a consultant for the Planning Commission of India. As of January 2007, Agarwal is the Visiting Research Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University.

Additional Honors

First Ramesh Chandra Agrawal Award 2005 for Outstanding Contributions to Agricultural Economics.

Malcolm Adiseshiah Award 2002 for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies.

AWARDS for A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia:

Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize 1996, given by the Association for Asian Studies (USA), for the best English-language, non-fiction book on South Asia, published anywhere. (First South Asian to win the prize.)

Edgar Graham Book Prize 1996, given every two years by The University of London’s the Department of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies. This award is given to the best works dealing with agricultural and industrial development in Asia and/or Africa

The K. H. Batheja Award 1995-96 given every two years by Bombay University and the Batheja Trust awarding the most deserving works about India and Development.

Selected Works and Books

* "Monsoon Poems" (1976) – Agarwal’s only book of poetry

* "Mechanization in Indian Agriculture" (1983)

* "Cold Hearths and Barren Slopes: The Woodfuel Crisis in the Third World" (1986)

* "Structures of Patriarchy: State, Community, and Household in Modernizing Asia" (1998) ed.

* "A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia" (1994)

* "Capabilities, Freedom and Equality: Amartya Sen’s Work From A Gender Perspective" (2006) ed.ISS HONORARY DOCTORATE AWARD, 2007

References

* http://www.binaagarwal.com

* Agarwal, Bina (1994) "A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia" Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

* Agarwal, Bina (1997) “’Bargaining’ and Gender Relations: Within and Beyond the Household” in Feminist Economics v.3 (1)

* Agarwal, Bina and Panda Pradeep (9/72003) “Home and the World: Revisiting Violence” in The Indian Express

* Agarwal, Bina (9/25/2005) “Landmark Step to Gender Equality” in The Hindu

* Pradeep, Panda and Bina Agarwal (2005) “Marital Violence, Human Development and Women’s Property Status in India” in World Development v.3 (5)