Bina Agarwal

Re-Thinking the Way We Farm Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the University of Manchester

Bina Agarwal is Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the University of Manchester, UK. Prior to this, she was Professor and Director at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi University. She was educated at the Universities of Cambridge and Delhi.

Agarwal has been President of the International Society for Ecological Economics, President of the International Association for Feminist Economics, and Vice President of the International Economics Association. She holds honorary doctorates from ISS, The Hague, and the University of Antwerp, and is an elected member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Italy as well as a Fellow of The World Academy of Science (TWAS).

She has written extensively on agrarian change, environmental governance, property and land rights, food security, and poverty and inequality, especially from a gender and political economy perspective. Her 13 books include the award-winning, A Field of One’s Own (Cambridge University Press,1994); 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 (2021, in Italian trans.). She has written for the New York Times, and writes often for Indian Express, Times of India and Outlook.

Among her many awards and honours are several book prizes; a Padma Shri prize in 2008 from the President of India; the Leontief Prize 2010 ‘for advancing the frontiers of economic thought’; the Louis Malassis International Scientist Prize 2017; Order of Agricultural Merit, France, 2017; and the International Balzan Prize 2017, ‘for challenging established premises in economics and the social sciences by using an innovative gender perspective’.