Women's mobility is restricted due to responsibility for livestock care.
Examining Agency in Agriculture: The Feminization Debate in Nepal
(She/Her)
PhD Researcher
Kathmandu University
With a decade of professional experience in development sector and academia, I am interested in transdisciplinary action research where theoretical understanding of diverse world problems and challenges are associated with practical implementation of solutions for social change.
Nepalese
The extent of livestock feminization affects the pattern of gendered mobility and non-mobility resulting in the choice dilemma individuals face to reshape their lives.
Key Findings
Men are able to re-enter agriculture, but their activities tend to be limited to market-orientated crops, while women focus on domestic work e.g. livestock care. This is becoming solely a task for wives/daughter-in-laws, whereas it used to be a shared task.
As men leave, women tend to take care of all household responsibilities, including livestock management, which was previously looked after by both husbands and wives. But when women leave, women’s work is unattended to by their male counterparts, or is not up to the satisfaction of women, forcing women to take over their responsibilities once again.
How to use
Further exploration of the feminisation of livestock in particular and its relation to gendered mobility. It suggests that there are more factors shaping farm women’s choices within household labour arrangements.     
Want to read the full paper? It is available open access
Rana, Hritika; Banskota, Mahesh; and Sharma, Sagar Raj (2018). ‘Examining Agency in Agriculture: The Feminization Debate in Nepal’, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 19(3), 32-48.
About this research
This research was funded by an external organisation, but detail has not been provided.
Recommended for
UN Sustainable Development Goals
This research contributes to the following SDGs
About this research
This research was funded by an external organisation, but detail has not been provided.
This paper was co-authored
Mahesh Banskota
Sagar Raj Sharma
Recommended for
What it means
Women’s lived experiences underscore concerns surrounding evolving gender norms, attitudes and practices around agriculture from an agency perspective.
Women have to choose agricultural tasks based on their adaptive preferences under limited circumstances. Which raises the question of how different women’s lives would be if they did not need to take up livestock rearing.
Methodology
Narrative cases backed by ethnographic study comprised of informal interviews and participant observation. Participant observation, and a biographical narrative interview method (BNIM) were used for data collection and analysis. From 140 individuals interviewed during household screening, three cases have been selected for this paper.
Limitations include that typical purposive case sampling has been used to show the relevance of the phenomenon. Researchers tend to also question this type of sampling as there might be a tendency of researcher bias.
Glossary
Agency
This was used as an analytical lens. Not only includes pro-active decision-making on the part of women, but also incorporates adaptive preferences in light of decision-making which is influenced by social norms as much as it is shaped by the structures of existing arrangements.
Feminisation of agriculture
While women continue doing work previously done by women of earlier generations, men have left behind traditional agricultural work that was conducted by an earlier generation of men.
Social Norms
Govern the division of roles, responsibilities and resources between household members along the lines of age, gender and marital status.
Let your research make a social impact
Arianne Zajac prepared this research following an interview with Dr Hritika Rana.
