Women’s self-help groups, natural farming, and the gendered politics of agrarian governance in India

Abstract

Recent years have seen increased scholarly interest in how to “scale” agroecology through institutional mechanisms, however little research has examined the gendered dynamics of such institutional scaling. This paper attempts to build this research through examining how state agencies and NGOs in India use women’s Self-Help Groups (SHGs) as shared infrastructure for promoting natural farming. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork across two districts in eastern Madhya Pradesh, this paper identifies two interrelated governance dynamics from using women’s institutions as platforms of implementation. First, constrained participation refers to how women are recruited as frontline agents of agricultural change yet lack the household authority, time, and material support necessary to ensure its adoption. Second, redistributed liability describes how when interventions falter, accountability can travel downward through domestic relationships, community reputation, and SHG social networks, settling on the women tasked with delivery rather than institutional actors responsible for intervention design. We situate these findings within feminist scholarship on development and debates on agroecology governance. Overall the paper’s main argument is that SHGs in India increasingly work as infrastructures of state and NGO governance, and that routing natural farming through SHGs has the potential to shift the risks of agricultural transition onto SHG members.