A feminist political ecology of agricultural innovations in smallholder farming 1 systems: Experiences from wheat production in Morocco and Uzbekistan

Abstract

The socio-ecological drivers of agricultural innovations have been a major focus of study in the human-environment sciences for at least three decades (e.g., Borremans et al., 2018; Doss & Morris, 2000; Louah et al., 2017; Weyori et al., 2018). Over these years, a clear consensus has emerged that innovations are important for adapting to drought and overcoming other biophysical limitations in smallholder farming systems (Borremans et al., 2018; Eastwood et al., 2017; Weyori et al., 2018). This body of work has also shown that women are often largely marginalized from agricultural innovations (Peterman et al., 2010; Seymour et al., 2016) although they are heavily engaged in food production (Doss & Morris, 2000). Many studies also suggest that women’s burden increases with the introduction of new agricultural technologies. In some contexts, the introduction of new technologies affects patterns of labor, land, and resource allocation between men and women. Given the central role that women play in agriculture, food security, nutrition, and family well-being (Quisumbing et al., 2014), it is important to understand how their innovation capacity could be strengthened. Although a fair amount of attention has been paid to the determinants of technology adoption in the economic development literature (e.g., Doss & Morris, 2000; Quisumbing et al., 2014), much less attention has been given to understanding the gender-specific constraints to agricultural innovations that include agronomic and resources management practices.