Gendering the Political Economy of Smallholder Agriculture: A Scoping Review

Abstract

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. Introduction

Smallholder agriculture plays a prominent role in local economies and contributes greatly to global agribusiness (Dürr 2016). Smallholder agriculture has been emphasized as a means to greater food security and poverty reduction, but also for the creation of more efficient (Dürr 2016) and sustainable food systems (Farhall and Rickards 2021). The political economy of agriculture is a field characterized by change, such as increased commodification, livelihood diversification, new value chains, globalization, technological innovation, and more (Sachs et al. 2019). Within current agricultural schemes, there is recognition that smallholder agriculture comes with many challenges, including access to financial resources, limited farm size, price volatility, and limited access to modern markets (Fan and Rue 2020); and changes due to climate change, including decreased crop yields and altered growing seasons (Cohn et al. 2017). These shifts in the context of agricultural production can change gender roles and dynamics within the communities impacted. Women and men’s participation within agricultural systems involves ever-shifting gender roles and identities, which vary greatly depending on the context in which they exist (Sachs et al. 2019). These dynamics can amplify gender inequality in smallholder farming households (Farhall and Rickards 2021). For example, women smallholder farmers are found to be more impacted by climate change-related shocks due to financial or resource constraints and because conventional climate adaptation strategies can create higher labor loads for women (Jost et al. 2015). Political economy approaches to agricultural analysis focus on the social, political, ideational, and institutional contexts into which capitalism is embedded, and place emphasis on power relations (Koch and Buch-Hansen 2021). These approaches can be used to interrogate agricultural systems as well as the gender relations and ideologies with which they intersect. Agrarian political economy traditionally employs Marxist frameworks to analyze macrostructures, most notably class structures as well as technological and commercial aspects (Angeles and Hill 2009) that impact these contexts and power relations (Koch and Buch-Hansen 2021).

In Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value, he characterizes the smallholder farmer as “cut up into two persons” (Marx 1969, p. 408). Marx describes these two persons in the following way: “as owner of the means of production he is a capitalist, as laborer he is his own wage laborer.” He notes that “as capitalist… he exploits himself as wage laborer, and pays himself in surplus value” (Marx 1969, p. 408). This characterization treats the household as a homogenous unit, one organized and run by a ubiquitous, often assumed male, ‘smallholder farmer’, and is the characterization most often employed in political economy analysis. This approach neglects internal household dynamics. Some scholars have highlighted the importance of recognizing the family farm as a collaborative and complex entity which is composed of a variety of actors, not exclusively the household head, and influenced by multiple forces (Argent 1999). The dynamics of smallholding farming households are often considered to be enclosed in a “black box” (Argent 1999), as the decisions which characterize these dynamics occur behind closed doors. Inside the black box may lie insights into how household members navigate economic and other decisions and can point to both the patterns of household dynamics as well as unique features of household relationships and interactions as the survival of these households often depends largely on the work that women perform (Masamha et al. 2017). Masamha et al. points out that “gender defined roles and relations within value chains, and within households, affect men’s and women’s access to productive resources, decision making, access to financial services, control over incomes and direct involvement in payment systems” (Masamha et al. 2017, p. 84). A study by Quisumbing shows that if women had access to the same resources that men do, they could increase their farms’ outputs by nearly 20–30% (Quisumbing et al. 2014). Women play an important role in smallholder agricultural production, but it has been noted that there is a lack of attention paid to gender in agricultural research, from a simple lack of sex-disaggregated data to more complicated issues of gender norms or equity (Sachs et al. 2019). Mainstream agrarian political economy literature often ignores concepts of gender differentiation, identity creation, and expression in farming households.

Across contexts, women are often disadvantaged compared to men in terms of access to capital, land, labor, and markets (Sachs et al. 2019). Within farming households, women are responsible for a variety of tasks both on and off the farm (Sachs et al. 2019). For example, studies have found caregiving responsibilities can limit women’s ability to generate income via off-farm employment (Mao et al. 2017) and that drivers of entry into off-farm employment are country and gender specific (Van den Broeck and Kilic 2019). The gendered division of labor in agriculture is found to vary not only cross-culturally and regionally in accordance with cultural constructions of femininity and masculinity, but also within given regions in conjunction with the predominant “social relations of production, income-generating opportunities, and peasant social differentiation.” (Deere 1995, p. 55). Unpaid domestic labor produces vital inputs for the economy, including inputs to the labor force via reproduction as well as through other intangible social benefits (Razavi 2009). Women’s work, which can consist of unpaid inputs to the economy, is often hidden from or ignored by political economy scholarship. For example, a study conducted by Mackenzie in sub-Saharan Africa examining the impact of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) on smallholder farming households found that any efficiency or productivity gained through the reallocation of resources in the macro economy is achieved through shifting costs from a paid to unpaid economy via an intensification of women’s labor (Mackenzie 1993). Inclusion of gender in agrarian political economy literature is thus essential to understand the true costs and impacts of development programs, the differences in resource distribution and access between men and women, and the gendered roles that both women and men play in the maintenance of their small farming households. This review seeks to understand how gender, as a frame or unit of analysis, is incorporated into the political economy of agriculture literature. The purpose of this review is to identify and analyze how gender is used in political economy approaches to agricultural scholarship. The aim is to understand how gender is addressed in the political economy literature on smallholder agriculture in order to contribute to gender-informed political economy approaches within future research.

2. Methods

2.1. Identifying a Research Question

This scoping review seeks to answer the question of how gender has been incorporated into agrarian political economy literature. In this study, gender is understood by the World Health Organization as “the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other” (World Health Organization n.d.). This study seeks to understand how scholars have attended to gender in their political economy frameworks when exploring the political economy of agricultural production.

2.2. Search Strategy

We employed a scoping review methodology using methods developed by Arksey and O’Malley. Scoping reviews are meant to address broad and under-researched topics and are intended to ‘map’ the existing literature in a given field. Our review is conducted to examine the extent, range, and nature of concepts of gender used in the political economy of agriculture literature, one of the key features of a scoping review (Arksey and O’Malley 2005). Keywords were pulled from the three main domains included in this review: political economy, gender, and agriculture. University librarians, one with an understanding of scoping methodologies and another with knowledge of gender and international development, were consulted in the creation of key terms and database selection. The search was conducted through April 2021 and was imported into Rayyan on 7 May 2021. The databases SCOPUS, Gender Watch, Gender Studies, and EconLit were used to locate articles. For complete terms, please refer to

Table 1. Search terms for the scoping review.

Search Terms
AGRICULTURE: agricultur* OR horticultur* OR arable OR smallhold* OR farm? OR farmer? OR farming OR agbio* OR agrofuel* or agrarian* FEMINIST: feminist OR wom?n OR gender* OR female? OR girl? POLITICAL ECONOMY: political economy or political ecology or land policy or land policies or orati?ation OR neo-liberal OR capitalis? OR privati?ation OR economic AND reform? OR government?

. Excluding duplicates, this search strategy yielded 3965 articles. No temporal or geographic restrictions were used. Because of this, studies published at any time and from all countries or regions were eligible for inclusion, though articles needed to be published in English. These restrictions placed on the search strategy were purposefully broad to capture the most literature available, as it was expected that there would be a shortage of literature which would meet the inclusion criteria.

2.3. Study Selection

Two reviewers (RL and SB) and MC were randomly assigned the same twenty article titles and abstracts to independently review in order to assess agreement on the interpretation of the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Agreement was 90% between the three reviewers. Upon resolution of disagreements, MC then reviewed all titles and abstracts for full text consideration. MC reviewed 3965 articles by performing a search of the titles and abstracts for the term “political economy”, and only those articles which included this term in the title or abstract (n = 233) were reviewed. From these articles, 22 were selected to move to full text screening, either because they demonstrated all inclusion criteria, or because they demonstrated nearly all inclusion criteria, and a full text review would be necessary to ascertain compliance with the remaining criteria or demonstration of any exclusion criteria. From the full text screen 14 articles were selected for inclusion in the study (for the PRISMA diagram of this search, see Figure 1). Challenges were discussed with the research team throughout this process (for complete inclusion and exclusion criteria, see

Table 2. Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria.

Inclusion Criteria

Exclusion Criteria

Must specifically reference political economy as a model or framework for the article (i.e., “We draw on New Institutional Economics, political economy and the value chain analysis framework to assess the potential role of contracting to promote gender equity among smallholder organic horticultural producers.” (Bullock et al. 2018, abstract)). Primary research subject or focus of article must be farmers or farming households operating at small scale or subsistence level. Must mention gender or related (women/girls, gender dynamics, feminism).

Does not mention political economy or only mentions political economy briefly or in passing (“i.e., It is not clear whether child mortality or maternal mortality is the key to the political economy of Indian demography” (Harriss 1989, abstract)). primary research subject is not smallholder farmers/farming households. Does not mention gender or related subject.

).

2.4. Data Extraction

A data extraction table (see Online Supplement 1) was developed by MC and RL. The data extraction categories were informed by the overarching research question. The following information was extracted from the included articles: article details (e.g., author, title, affiliations, journal), article focus (e.g., location, objective, reasons given as to why gender is not included in wider PE literature, how gender is discussed), methods and frameworks (e.g., type of research, sources of data, how gender is analyzed, definition of political economy, other frameworks used), and key study findings. The data extraction table was populated both by direct quotes as well as summaries of key points by MC.

2.5. Results Collation

From this data extraction table, articles were organized based on when they were published (year), and main themes were identified through close reading of several columns. The study involved a deductive approach that identified article content according to pre-determined categories such as those presented in

Table 3. Descriptive results.

Descriptives
Data type, n
Primary data	7
Secondary data	4
Combination	3
Year of publication n
1985–1999	3
2000–2014	2
2015–2021	9
Location, n
LMICs	12
Sub-Saharan Africa	9
East Asia and the Pacific	2
The Caribbean	1
HICs (Australia and Greece)	2

. The inductive analysis involved a grouping of content within pre-determined questions and categories. These questions and categories included definitions of political economy, reasons that gender is not included in PE frameworks, and how articles include gender, i.e., how it is discussed and analyzed within included articles. We then completed a second close reading of the extracted data to ensure that the extracted data were reflected in the developed themes and that no additional topics were missed.

3. Results

3.1. Descriptive Results

Fourteen articles were included for analysis. Most articles were written between 2015–2021, with only five being written before 2015. Most articles (n = 12) focused on smallholder agriculture in Lower- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). The two High-Income Countries (HICs) represented are Greece (Sifaki) and Australia (Argent). Of the twelve articles on LMICs, half (n = 6) have first authors from LMICs. Generally, these authors were from the country of interest or nearby, for example an author from Kenya writing about agriculture in Tanzania. The remainder of articles have authors exclusively from HICs.

3.2. Definition of Political Economy

The articles included in the review described political economic frameworks in a variety of ways. A common message across articles is that political economy is meant to encompass the interrelationships between individuals, governments, and policy. The articles used political economy frameworks to locate gender ideologies and conditions within larger social and political contexts. Mackenzie employs political economic analysis “To stress the relationship between small-scale event (within the household and community) and large-scale process (at the national and international levels)” (Mackenzie 1993, p. 74). In doing so, Mackenzie moves women, whose livelihoods generally exist as small-scale events (Mackenzie 1993), firmly into the domain of political economic analyses by emphasizing the linkage between these small-scale events and the larger-scale processes which are the more traditional concern of political economy literature. This description, that political economy can be applied at varying levels of analysis to connect them together, carries through to the remainder of the included literature, as most articles attempt to include gender within political economic analyses by incorporating “separate but interrelated planes and scales of analysis” (Argent 1999, p. 13). For example, in Argent’s work, these planes and scales take the form of “the farm family as situated within advanced capitalism and as physically situated within the natural environment, interpenetrated by kinship relations and their gender ideologies and regulatory and market conditions” (Argent 1999, p. 13). This example demonstrates a clear linkage between the “small-scale event” (the family farm and its associated intrahousehold relationships) and “large-scale processes” (capitalism, natural environments, market conditions, and gender ideologies).

Though all included articles employ political economic frameworks, the definitions of political economy tend to be tied to the specific area of the article’s focus and generally incorporate other frameworks and theories. The other theories integrated with a political economy approach include political ecology (Ankrah et al. 2020), poststructuralist (Angeles and Hill 2009; Ankrah et al. 2020; Argent 1999; Thompson 2019) and postcolonial theories (Angeles and Hill 2009; Koss 2016), New Institutional Economics (Bullock et al. 2018), value chain analyses (Bullock et al. 2018), and others. For example, political economy is taken by Angeles, whose work focuses on agricultural transition, to encompass requisite processes for this transition, with a focus on livelihood or economic diversification. She argues that discursive power, the production or reproduction of dominant gender discourses such as those around “motherhood, breadwinner/family provider, housewife, community leader and gender identities” (Angeles and Hill 2009, p. 613) that are wielded by the state and local development organizations, contributes to the reproduction of gender identities, norms, and hierarchies in areas undergoing agrarian transition.

Political economy is used specifically to engage with institutional processes and bureaucracies that are requisite for transition and examine how their policies and practices can and do impose structural constraints on how people view themselves, their identities, and their contributions. For Angeles, the institutions which shape identities are national and local bureaucracies—state and non-state forms of governance and development practices. These institutions can perpetuate and shape gendered identities and ideologies in a variety of ways. For example, in one study site Angeles interviewed civil servants who expressed views that the ‘male provider’ had the explicit responsibility to care for the family and their financial wellbeing, and in this site found agricultural programs geared almost exclusively toward the needs of men and to the neglect of women farmers (Angeles and Hill 2009). For Sifaki, whose work regards global production networks and commercial relations, political economy is used to highlight how these relations can embody and reproduce gendered norms, values, and ideologies. Sifaki combined feminist political economy with global production network analysis to analyze the “influence of austerity measures, intrahousehold relations, and commercial requirements on women’s agency” (Sifaki 2019, p. 74). This allowed for a combined analysis of the “vertical bargaining” between households and actors along the supply chain with a “horizontal” analysis of the influence of wider intrahousehold relations and state policies outside the value chain.

3.3. Why Gender Is Not Included in PE Literature/Frameworks

The consensus found across the articles that were analyzed was that much of the political economy theory described by the included articles is rooted in Marxist thought. It was noted in several articles that assumptions drawn from Marxist theory are “too unilinear, too macro-structural, too denying of human agency, and too unconnected with practice” (Argent 1999, p. 3). It was further noted that these assumptions tend to place emphasis on class, particularly the unequal global distribution of wealth and poverty, above social conditions such as gender and race (Thompson 2019). From this perspective, authors expressed that it is often difficult to extract micro-level politics of everyday struggles from the larger macro-level political economy (Angeles and Hill 2009). They note that these are necessary distinctions that allow for a discussion regarding the intersection of the larger political–economic context with small-scale manifestations of gendered experiences, such as household relations or individual identity formation. Incorporating gender in a meaningful capacity is difficult for feminist scholarship when political economy literature often conceptualizes macro-level trends such as liberalization and globalization as processes which are ‘top down and abstract’, making it challenging to incorporate micro-level processes into the scale of analysis, and oftentimes rules out the micro-level processes as relevant (Razavi 2009; Thompson 2019).

Several authors asserted that when the political economy of agriculture literature includes gender it often deploys it only as a category or variable. Razavi makes the point that “it is the narrow, static, and ahistorical manner in which gender inequality is understood and captured—not as inequalities in social relations of gender that are shaped by broader economic and political processes, but as a simple gender-disaggregation of crops and inputs—that makes these case studies problematic and the policy claims that are made in their name highly spurious and misleading” (Razavi 2009, p. 205). Similarly, Koss explains that the simple inclusion of gender as a stratifying variable when analyzing resource allocation or some other variable of interest in agricultural political economy work, rather than as the basis for substantive analysis of gender-based micro-level trends and processes, can corrupt the messaging of scholars and can discount the actual systems of power which shape gender dynamics (Koss 2016).

Additionally, according to several included articles, the scholarship on gender and the political economy of farming households does not “reflect contemporary understanding of the nuances taking place in the global south and its intersection with factors that go beyond gender (male or female)” (Ankrah et al. 2020, p. 2). Authors critiqued the western development discourse that prescribes a reductive narrative upon women in the global south, attempting to summarize rather than describe the nuanced differences in experiences of diverse populations. According to Koss, women in the global south compose not a ‘real’ but an imagined political subject, and it is this imagining by western scholarship and development rhetoric which reduces them to a homogenous half of a binary. Ankrah asserts that this dyadic consideration of gender, as being either male or female, fails to examine the intersectional experiences of men and women in the global south, and Thompson notes that this approach fails to consider the complexity of their identities.

Several of the articles which were published since 2015 point out that gender has been incorporated into feminist political economy or political ecology frameworks over the past two decades, and the authors draw from these frameworks to include gender along with other intersecting socio-political characteristics in their analysis of agricultural contexts. Several authors say they were informed by feminist political economy frameworks specifically because this framework does include gender in its analytical structure (Bullock et al. 2018; Fonjong and Gyapong 2021; Sifaki 2019). The most recently published article states that feminist agrarian political economists, informed by Marxist thought, have highlighted the “centrality of women’s work in the household economy, and even in recent times, their incorporation into the capitalist production through wage labour” (Fonjong and Gyapong 2021, p. 3). Some articles give no reason for the limited amount of work on the topic but state that the exclusion of gender is evident (Koss 2016; Mackenzie 1993; Sulle and Dancer 2020). Others do not make any claim to the limited attention gender has received by political economic literature (Georgeou et al. 2019; Mbilinyi 2016).

3.4. How Gender Is Discussed and Analyzed

Our analysis of the included articles identified two main ways that gender is discussed. These categories are not all encompassing; there is often significant overlap between them, and articles might display characteristics of multiple categories. Peterson and Thompson both describe two main ways that gender is discussed: empirical and analytical gender. Empirical gender is taken to mean “study of how men and women—gender understood empirically—are differently affected by, and differently affect, political economy”, while analytical gender is understood to “study how masculinity and femininity—gender understood as a meaning system—produce, and are produced by, political economy” (Peterson 2006, p. 409). The categories discussed below reflect these distinctions and align with the categories presented by Peterson and Thompson but were created independently of their work. See

Table 4. The two categories of gender identified in the literature.

Categories	Articles	Focus	Goal of Work
Empirical gender (n = 7)	(Allison 1985; Bullock et al. 2018; Sifaki 2019; Ankrah et al. 2020; Fonjong and Gyapong 2021)	Differences between experiences of men and women, compared using a measurable variable.	To better understand the complex functioning of households and their individual members.
Analytic gender (n = 5)	(Razavi 2009; Mackenzie 1993; Argent 1999; Angeles and Hill 2009; Thompson 2019; Koss 2016)	Formation, interaction, and consolidation of gender roles and dynamics as viewed by individuals, members of other genders, and power systems.	To examine the creation and existence of varying femininities and masculinities within their surrounding political, economic, social, and natural environments.

for a summary of these categories.

First, seven articles (Allison 1985; Ankrah et al. 2020; Bullock et al. 2018; Fonjong and Gyapong 2021; Georgeou et al. 2019; Sifaki 2019; Sulle and Dancer 2020) discussed the differences between experiences of men and women, either in a specific area or in terms of general experiences, often in the context of households and household members (Allison 1985; Ankrah et al. 2020; Bullock et al. 2018; Fonjong and Gyapong 2021; Sifaki 2019). These studies compared men and women to each other regarding a measurable variable such as resource allocation or land tenure. These articles were often written with the purpose of opening the “black box” of farming households to better understand the complex functioning of households. Authors noted that these households are often historically and inaccurately viewed as homogenous entities, and this literature hopes to elaborate on how these households and their members, categorized by gender, interact with their surrounding political, economic, social, and natural environments. The five most recently published articles employed this method of discussing gender.

The second approach to gender analyzed the formation, interaction, and consolidation of gender roles and dynamics. Six articles fit within this category (Angeles and Hill 2009; Argent 1999; Koss 2016; Mackenzie 1993; Razavi 2009; Thompson 2019). This literature focuses on how men and women interact with and view each other; how they view and are viewed by the state or development agencies; and how their identities are shaped by their engagement with their surrounding political, economic, social, and natural environments, as well as the existence and impact of discursive power on this process of identity formation. Emphasis is placed on intersectionality, as gender is not the only factor or force which shapes identity and positionality. Finally, one article (Mbilinyi 2016) discusses gender outside of these categories. This article analyzes women only, including discussing their roles, positions, and struggles though a historical analysis of colonization.

This second approach, which lends itself to an analysis of identity formation, is used in articles to examine the creation and existence of varying masculinities and femininities. Angeles argues that identity formation is a continuous process which is wrought through “the interplay of culture, class, nationality and other fields of power” (Angeles and Hill 2009, p. 614). She argues that these masculinities and femininities are shaped by corresponding social, economic, political, and environmental contexts of the places and times the subjects of this identity formation find themselves. This process of identity formation can demonstrate the gender ideologies within a given state or society. Thompson investigates this ideological dimension of gender, coupled with material dimensions which include “how women and men gain access to or are allocated power, status, and material and non-material resources” (Thompson 2019, p. 181), as well corresponding intersections with race and class, in order to “grasp the interplay between macrolevel structures and institutions, and identities and lives lived at the micro level” (Thompson 2019, p. 182). In doing so, she connects the micro- and macro-levels, small-scale events and large-scale processes, in terms of individual identity formation.

Other articles that discuss identity formation focus more on household dynamics. By providing perspective “on how individual farm women and men relate to each other and to the community of which they are a part”, Argent examines “how gender relations and ideologies are reflexively interpreted, reproduced and occasionally transformed.” (Argent 1999, p. 2). Argent locates household relationships as part of a gender regime, which is in turn placed within a larger gender order. For example, in his study of Kangaroo Island farm families, he finds a reflexive relationship between the historically rooted conservative masculinist ideology, which composes the gender order, and the family level gender regimes which exist within it. These regimes are examined as specific points within the broad matrix of patriarchal relationships, where the gender order is historically structured and integrally embedded within social institutions. In the family farms of Kangaroo Island, the gender order present across the Island influenced the sexual division of on- and off-farm work amongst the surveyed Island farm families. This resulted in women’s off-farm incomes being “primarily used for the household’s consumption (e.g., groceries, children’s education), and yet these same women were still responsible for the maintenance of the household” (Argent 1999).

In many included articles, emphasis is placed on concepts of intersectionality, which is described by Thompson as a “useful methodological framing for the analysis of the complexity of gendered power relations with other relations, both structural and agential” (Thompson 2019, p. 182). There are a variety of factors which can influence the lived experiences of women in the agricultural sector, including race, ethnicity, class, sexual identity, and others. As noted in the analytic approach to gender and political economy, authors argue that women cannot be treated as simply a category of analysis, but “development theory and political texts often perpetuate a language that constitutes ‘women’ as a coherent, monolithic group” (Koss 2016, p. 30). Koss states that this binary often extends within political economic analyses and overlaps with a power binary: people who have power (men), and people who do not (women). Ankrah promotes the usage of a political ecology framework for its emphasis on the idea of intersectionality. He states that gender, and its intersections with race, class, ethnicity, and culture, influence the differing experiences and interests of women and men in terms of access to resources in a given setting (Ankrah et al. 2020).

4. Discussion

This scoping review identified 14 studies which discuss and analyze gender and agriculture using political economy frameworks. First, this review finds that there are numerous definitions of political economy and various ways of utilizing a political economy framework based on the specific areas of focus. A unifying theme across definitions involved the linkage between small and large scales of analysis. Similarly, this review finds that there are varying ways in which gender has been addressed in political economy frameworks. These various ways can be categorized as empirical and analytical categories that address gender. These approaches are found to attend to the complexity and heterogeneity of farming households and gendered identities. Below we discuss linkages between scales of analysis, approaches to discussing gender, the importance of intersectionality, and new frameworks, and relate these considerations to advance a gender-oriented political economy approach to agricultural research.

4.1. Discussion of Results

Political economy, as used in the articles included in this review, as well as in much recent agrarian political economy literature, focuses on the “social, political, ideational and institutional contexts into which capitalism is embedded”, and places an emphasis on power relations as well (Koch and Buch-Hansen 2021). Based on this definition, political economy frameworks, with their emphasis on power differentials and analysis of ideologies as located within socially, politically, and economically constructed realities, should be amenable to including gender considerations more often and in a more integrated form. Power is understood by feminist scholars in several ways. When it is conceptualized as a resource, it is understood that this resource is often unequally distributed between men and women, and when it is viewed as the existence of dominating forces by one group over or against another, it manifests for feminist scholars as patriarchy (Allen 2016). The political economy of agriculture literature often includes analyses of these power dynamics, but rarely extends this analysis to include gender, as demonstrated by the limited number of articles included in this review. The limited work on this topic may be due to a variety of factors, the most notable of which are 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.

Gender is historically enacted at the scale of the everyday, which is “where subject identities and social orders are brought into being and contested” (Sundberg 2017, p. 5), but these gender norms and identities are formed under the influence of large-scale structures and fields of power (Angeles and Hill 2009). This review finds that in order to incorporate this ‘everyday scale’ into a traditionally large-scale political economy analysis, the articles in this review included some discussion or analysis of the linkage or relationship between scales, such as the ‘gender regime’ of household dynamics as being located within a wider structural ‘gender order’ described by Argent (1999). The large and small scales were bridged in a variety of ways that deviate from the Marxist tradition, which places emphasis on class conflict and the macro-structures of the wider political economy to the exclusion of micro-level processes, social contexts, and identities. These linkages between small and large scales can potentially be applied to a variety of social categories, not just gender, in order to connect them to political economy analyses.

Structuralist political theories, a category into which political economy falls, posit that structures and people’s relationships to these structures determine their experiences (Gao 2007). As demonstrated through this discussion, a gender-based approach to political economy suggests an understanding of gender that is not static, but rather one that is constructed and expressed differently across different historical, geographic, political, and cultural contexts which produce and maintain it. In line with this understanding, Judith Butler critiques Western feminism’s attempts to decontextualize gender from other axes of power such as class, race, and ethnicity in the misguided pursuit of creating a universally applicable category of ‘women’, which cannot and should not exist (Butler 1990). This perspective opens the door for a constructivist understanding of the macro-structures which might influence gender identity formation and expression as this emphasis on contexts reflects the ontological assumptions of constructivist theory that realities are locally and specifically constructed (Aliyu et al. 2014). For example, a study conducted by Lin et al. on land tenure for women in several rural Chinese villages found substantial regional variation in women’s land tenure security despite the same nationally enforced regulations existing across the country. Lin found that policies and laws are deconstructed through local social processes through which different local actors, including governments, village committees, village leaders, men, and women, utilize “different configurations of power to pursue their respective interests” (Lin and Zhang 2007, p. 638). In these ways gender is reinforced or perpetuated by macrostructural factors, but is not exclusively determined by them, and is also shaped by household decisions and interactions.

The two key lenses—empirical and analytical—used to discuss gender within the agrarian political economy literature outlined in this review can be applied to future work in this field. Both lenses have their own contributions and contexts, which might be distinct or overlapping, in which they can be applied. Empirical gender is used to discuss quantifiable differences between women and men, and analytical gender tends to be used to understand how femininities and masculinities are created and reproduced. Both lenses also utilize varying theoretical perspectives which exist along a continuum from positivism to poststructuralism. Empirical gender, understood as the ways that women and men differently affect and are differently affected by political economy, exists on the positivist/rationalist epistemological side of the continuum. Analytical gender, which considers gender as a system of meaning that produces and is produced by the political economy, follows constructivist and poststructuralist thinking (Peterson 2006). However, both lenses must attend to the heterogeneity of women as a category in order to avoid falling into the reductive patterns (i.e., man–woman as homogenous categories) displayed by much scholarship described in this review. Women across the world exist as a non-homogenous group on every scale and plane of analysis (Thompson 2019). Arguments which tend toward “women as…” (“women as victims”, “women as providers”, “women as oppressed minorities”, etc.) are frequently applied in development literature, but this discourse fails to consider the variety of factors which shape the lives of women and men and ignores the complexity of their identities and the relationship between the two groups.

This review describes the political identities of ‘woman’ and ‘man’ as being created through interactions between various fields of power. Similarly, according to poststructuralist theory, the category of ‘women’ is “produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought” (Allen 2016, Poststructuralist Feminist Approaches). These structures of power, often overlapping and interacting with one another, results in ‘women’ as being only politically created, non-real subjects (Angeles and Hill 2009). Thus, any scholarship which attends to ‘women’ as a unified cohort will fail to capture the experiences of their subjects, as well as the nuanced social processes they face at different levels.

In both outlined approaches to discussing gender, attention is placed on intersectionality. Koss describes intersectionality as being useful when it “emphasizes forces and processes rather than categories” (Koss 2016, p. 34). However, the definition of intersectionality, that “multiple social categories (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status) intersect at the micro level of individual experience to reflect multiple interlocking systems of privilege and oppression at the macro, social-structural level” (Bowleg 2012, abstract), necessitates categorization. Despite the limitations identified by a narrow “logic of identity” (Allen 2016), intersectionality is useful in attending to the heterogeneity of women’s lives. Articles which utilize empirical gender engage with intersectionality to understand the varying dynamics between and practices of women and men. Analytical gender articles use ideas of intersectionality to demonstrate the multitude of forces which shape identity and the production of masculinities and femininities.

4.2. Limitations

This review provides a starting point to begin to conscientiously combine a gender lens with political economy approaches to agricultural research. The review achieved the aim of identifying key studies over time that linked gender and political economy approaches, illuminating the different approaches taken to this linkage. The scoping review methodology was useful in casting a wide net on the existing literature, while ending with a small sample of included literature that is narrowly focused on the topic of interest. It may be that broadening the inclusion criteria beyond the requirement that the authors strictly mentioned that they were using a political economy approach may have captured a more diverse body of literature. One possibility that could have been pursued was the establishment of a range of core constructs included in a political economy approach and then using these constructs to inform the inclusion of articles that may not have used the term political economy but could be considered political economy studies. However, we think that our narrow approach left less room for conceptual confusion and attended to articles that explicitly linked gender, political economy, and agriculture in their analysis.

4.3. Implications and Future Directions

Thompson challenges scholars to develop frameworks that examine the interactions of people, women, and men within structures that are understood to be fundamentally gendered. Or put another way, the challenge is “to combine abstract processes, such as changing modes of production, while starting from the viewpoint of people who are imbued with complex identities” (Thompson 2019). Newer frameworks offer solutions to the aforementioned problems of political economy literature and have been incorporated into political economic analyses to better attend to gender.

For example, the linkages between small and large scales also contributes to a feminist political economic approach that analyzes the social relations of power as a whole, rather than as fragments at both scales. This is in line with socialist feminist political theory, which, rather than simply grafting gender analyses onto Marxist theory, seeks to engage with a reimagined theoretical framework that encompasses class and gender dynamics (Allen 2016). For example, dual systems theory, proposed by Nancy Fraser, analyzes the ‘dual systems’ of oppression facing women: (1) systems of male domination (patriarchy) and (2) modes of production and class relations (Allen 2016). This theory, while unifying, is criticized by some feminist scholars such as Iris Young for allowing Marxist thought to remain unchanged and only adding gender analyses as an addendum (Allen 2016). This theory enforces a binary which places political economy and culture at opposing ends of a spectrum onto which oppressions of various groups can be mapped (Young 1997), rather than integrating intersecting issues of culture and class together into one frame of analysis. In agriculture development literature specifically, several approaches to gender have been proposed and utilized. Gender mainstreaming recognizes that gender is not an add on or special topic, but rather exists within all aspects of society. Gender-transformative approaches have been introduced to tackle the structural causes of entrenched gender inequities which are replicated and enforced at multiple scales (Farhall and Rickards 2021). Kantor et al. found that gender-transformative approaches engage with the complex, interconnected, and cross-scale nature of gender by acknowledging the roles that norms, attitudes, and wider structural constraints play in limiting opportunities for both women and men (Kantor et al. 2015).

Political ecology grew out of political economy frameworks and seeks to understand the relationships people form with and the subsequent interactions people have within their natural and built environments (Abeysekera 2007). Feminist political ecology is a “subfield that brings feminist theory and objectives to political ecology” (Sundberg 2017, p. 1). Recent agrarian feminist political ecology literature takes care to incorporate gender with other interrelated units of analysis. For example, Nyantakyi-Frimpong’s 2017 study on agricultural diversification and dietary diversity in smallholder farming households uses feminist political ecology to demonstrate how the intersection of gender, seniority, marital status, and sexual politics shapes resource access and control (Nyantakyi-Frimpong 2017). Spangler’s work on the feminization of agriculture in Nepal utilizes feminist political ecology to “illuminate complexities of power, space, and individual responses to socio-ecological conditions” to challenge current frameworks and assumptions regarding the feminization of agriculture (Spangler and Christie 2020, abstract). Both of these articles use intersectional thinking to probe questions relating to gender roles while paying special attention to the heterogenous processes which shape and are shaped by gender dynamics across contexts.

There are a variety of reasons given for political economy literature to not attend to gender, the most notable of which being that emphasis exclusively on the macro-level, which is commonplace across political economy frameworks, results in limited attention to or complete ignorance of micro-level processes. This review provides several recommendations for authors to attend to these micro-level processes, especially the processes and structures which produce and constrain gender identity formation and expression. A gendered political economy of agriculture can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of how different expressions of gender dynamics within households can impact agricultural indicators and processes as well as impact how existing structures shape gender dynamics. This holds implications beyond academic thought on gender and political economy, as institutions are shown to shape gender dynamics. If institutions are created with ideas regarding gender at the forefront, they might in turn impact the daily realities of gendered experiences and realities. This paper presents newer frameworks that might shift academia, policy, and practice from top-down frameworks that do not take identity or intersectionality into account toward a more nuanced understanding of the interactions that shape daily life. This review demonstrates that gender is a complex system of meaning shaped through power systems and related structural factors such as history, geography, culture, politics, and the economy. A gendered political economy framework will pay attention to this intersectionality and use this to more readily account for the ways that gender and associated identities and ideas are understood, produced, mobilized, and limited in smallholder farming households and beyond.