Bina Agarwal

Bina Agarwal (2017)

The President, Smt. Pratibha Devisingh Patil presents the Padma Shri to Bina Agarwal at an Investiture I ceremony in Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi on May 5, 2008

Bina Agarwal (* 1951 in India ) is an Indian economist. She is Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the University of Manchester's Global Development Institute . She is a development economist whose aim is to change the living conditions of poor women in the rural population in India and in the global south.

life and work

Agarwal studied economics at the University of Cambridge in the UK , where she completed her undergraduate degree. In 1978 she did her doctorate in economics in Delhi and from 1988 she was professor of economics there. In 2009 she was appointed director of the Institute for Economic Growth. In 2012 she took up a Chair in Development Economics and Environment at the University of Manchester . She was also active in teaching and research positions at many universities, including Harvard University , Princeton University , University of Minnesota and University of Sussex . She was politically active z. B. in the UN committee for development policy and in the planning commission of the Indian government. Her research criticized gender-discriminatory notions about the contribution of women to the economy and provided the theoretical framework to identify the possibilities with which women can be empowered within and outside the family. Best known here was her successful 2005 campaign for a reform of inheritance law in India. In another fundamental and innovative study in 2010, she researched the question of whether forest protection can be strengthened by increasing the participation of women in forest management committees. Using an impressive amount of data as a basis, which she and a research team under her supervision had collected on site, she worked out the weaknesses of top-down approaches to environmental governance and showed that a critical mass of women on executive boards are more forestry Community institutions can further develop the quality of forests and biodiversity and thus improve environmental governance. Her work has received many awards and prizes. These include, among others, the Padma Shri, a civil order awarded by the Indian President in 2008, the Tufts University Leontief Prize in 2010 for “expanding the boundaries of economic thought” and the Louis Malassis International Scientific Prize 2017. She was Vice President of the International Economic Association , President of the International Association for Feminist Economics and board member of the Global Development Network. She is a founding member of the Indian Society for Ecological Economy. She was one of only two women who were appointed to the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission chaired by Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz and French President Nicolas Sarkozy . She was a consultant to the Planning Commission of India and a member of the editorial board of several international trade journals.

Honors (selection)

• 1994: Award for her book: A Field of One's Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia
• 1995: T KH Batheja Award, Bombay University
• 1996: Edgar Graham Book Prize, The University of London's the Department of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies
• 1996: Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize, Association for Asian Studies (USA)
• 2002: Malcolm Adiseshiah Award
• 2005: First Ramesh Chandra Agrawal Award
• 2007: Honorary doctorate from the Institute of Social Studies (ISS)
• 2008: Award by the President of India
• 2010: Leontief Prize , Global Development and Environment Institute (GDAE)
• 2011: Honorary doctorate from the University of Antwerp
• 2017: Balzan Prize for her work examining the contribution of women to agriculture in India
• 2017: Louis Malassis International Scientist Prize

Books

• Agarwal, Bina: Monsoon poems, USA: Ind-US Incorporated, 1976, ISBN 9780892538089 .
• Agarwal, Bina: Mechanization in Indian agriculture: an analytical study based on the Punjab, New Delhi et al .: Allied Publishing, 1986, ISBN 9788170230793 .
• Agarwal, Bina: Cold hearths and barren slopes: the woodfuel crisis in the Third World, New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1986, ISBN 9788170230076 .
• Agarwal, Bina; Afshar, Haleh: Women, poverty and ideology in Asia: contradictory pressures, uneasy resolutions. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire England: Macmillan, 1989, ISBN 9780333444092 .
• Agarwal, Bina: A field of one's own: gender and land rights in South Asia. Cambridge England New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1994, ISBN 9780521429269 .
• Agarwal, Bina: Structures of patriarchy: state, community, and household in modernizing Asia, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1988, ISBN 9788185107066 .
• Agarwal, Bina; Vercelli, Alessandro: Psychology, rationality, and economic behavior: challenging standard assumptions, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire New York: Palgrave Macmillan in association with International Economic Association., 2005, ISBN 9781403942531 .
• Agarwal, Bina: Capabilities, freedom, and equality: Amartya Sen's work from a gender perspective, New Delhi New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, ISBN 9780195692372 .
• Agarwal, Bina: Gender and green governance: the political economy of women's presence within and beyond community forestry, Oxford England New York USA: Oxford University Press, 2010, ISBN 9780191614309

Web links

• Bina Agarwal, 2017 Balzan Prize for Gender Studies
• Padma Awards Directory (1954-2013)
• Bina Agarwal, Professor of Development Studies
• Bina Agarwal at ISS