Gender, intersectionality and climate smart agriculture in South Asia: A review

Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA)—a set of practices and technologies developed to build agricultural resilience to climate change—has become a dominant intervention in addressing agrarian distress caused by the climate crisis in South Asia. This review, drawing on literature from India and supplemented by wider South Asian research, examines if the existing CSA interventions accounts for gender, and intersecting social identities of caste and class that shape who can access and benefit from it.

The article suggests that there is a dearth of intersectional analysis in CSA design or implementation. Mechanised tilling has contributed to a 22 percent decline in women’s agricultural labour in India between 1999 and 2011. Labour-saving technologies, while reducing drudgery for women who own land, frequently eliminates the wage labour that landless women depend on. From the 400 farmers surveyed in Maharashtra who sought access to credit through the Kisan Credit Card scheme, only 18 percent belonged to marginalised castes, while in a survey of 529 women farmers in Bihar, only 10 percent had successfully accessed the scheme at all. Self-help groups—the (Primary) institutional vehicle for women’s access to credit and information—frequently exclude women from the lowest sub-castes by informal practice even where their bylaws do not do so explicitly. The paper is significant for this archive because of its extended geographical focus and its intersectional approach. It delineates how the delivery of climate adaptation policy is hampered for women farmers from marginalised castes.