“Empowerment” without transformation? A critique of women empowerment without a masculinities lens in gender and agriculture literature

Abstract

Women empowerment in pursuit of gender equality has received much attention in agriculture and development practice literature. At the same time, there is increasing realization of the need for interventions that focus on masculinities in order to ensure sustainable transformation of social/gender relations in agricultural communities. However, a review of literature on women empowerment in agriculture over the period 2010 to 2022, targeting Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia revealed that notions of women empowerment and masculinities have been mostly studied and applied in agricultural research independent of each other and rarely in an interconnected manner. We argue that research and interventions on women empowerment without a masculinities lens pause a risk of ‘empowerment without transformation’ especially when root causes of unequal gender relations in farming communities are not challenged and/or are inadvertently reproduced.