Bina Agarwal is a Professor of Development Economics and Environment at The University of Manchester, UK, which she joined in late 2012. She was earlier a Director and Professor at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. She has been the President of the International Society for Ecological Economics; President of the International Association for Feminist Economics; and Vice-President of the International Economic Association. She was the first woman from the global south to hold these positions. Agarwal is a prolific writer with over 100 academic papers and 13 books. She brings to her work insights from both theory and field experience. She pioneered the issue of women’s land rights in her prize-winning book, A Field of One’s Own, placing the issue centrally on the agenda of governments, NGOs, and international agencies. Her recent books include Gender and Green Governance, Gender Challenges which is a three-volume compendium of her selected papers, and Gender Inequality in Developing Economies translated into Italian. Beyond academics Prof. Agarwal has also contributed to policy change. She has contributed to India’s Five-Year Plans. In 2005 she led a successful civil society campaign for amending the Hindu Succession Act to make it gender equal. She has received numerous awards since her student days. This includes several book prizes; a Padma Shri and the International Balzan Prize 2017 “for challenging established premises in economics and the social sciences by using an innovative gender perspective.” The Balzan is one of Europe’s biggest prizes and she is only the second woman from the Global South to win it, since its inception in 1961.

Links to a few selected writings of Prof. Bina Agarwal:

Agarwal, Bina. (2018). ‘Can group farms outperform individual family farms’, World Development, 108: 57-73,  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X18300913.

Agarwal, Bina. (2018). Gender equality, food security and the sustainable development goals’, Current Opinion on Environmental Sustainability, 34:26-32, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2018.07.002.

Agarwal, Bina. (2020). Does group farming empower rural women? Journal of Peasant Studies, 47(4), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03066150.2019.1628020?journalCode=fjps20.

Sugden, Fraser, Agarwal, Bina, et al (2020). Experiments in farmers’ collectives in Eastern India and Nepal: Process, benefits, and challenges, Journal of Agrarian Change, July, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/joac.12369.

Agarwal, Bina, Pervesh Anthwal and Malvika Mahesh. (2021). ‘How many and which women own land in India? Inter-gender and intra-gender gaps’, Journal of Development Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2021.1887478.

Agarwal, Bina (2022).  Imperatives of recognizing the complexities: gendered impacts and responses to COVID‑19 in India, Economia Politica, 39:31–53, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40888-021-00242-8.