Bina Agarwal

Bina Agarwal is a Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, UK. She is also affiliated with the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, where she was earlier Director and Professor of Economics. She has been President of the International Society for Ecological Economics; President of the International Association for Feminist Economics; and Vice President of the International Economic Association, and has held distinguished visiting positions at Harvard, Princeton, Minnesota and Cambridge.

Agarwal’s 88 academic papers and 13 books cover diverse subjects, including agrarian change, food security, environmental governance, land rights, group farming, and law, written especially from a gender and political economy perspective. Her award-winning book, A Field of One’s Own (Cambridge University Press, 1994), placed the issue of women’s land rights centrally on the global policy agenda. In 2005 she also led a successful civil society campaign to make India’s Hindu Inheritance law gender equal. Her recent books include Gender and Green Governance (Oxford University Press, 2010); Gender Challenges (OUP, 2016), a three volume compendium of her selected papers; and Gender Inequalities in Developing Economies (Il Mulino, 2021) in Italian translation.

Her work has garnered many awards including book prizes, a Padma Shri from the President of India, the Leontief Prize 2010 ‘for advancing the frontiers of economic thought’; the Louis Malassis International Scientist Prize; the International Balzan Prize 2017, ‘for challenging established premises in economics and the social sciences by using an innovative gender perspective,’ and the 2023 Kenneth Boulding award for Ecological Economics.