Patti Petesch

Agency, or our capacity to seize opportunities and make meaningful choices to shape our lives, is central to gender equality. Social norms—such as gender roles and the political and economic conditions of the societies, communities, and households we live in—can restrict or enhance our agency. On Norms and Agency explores some of these power dynami...

We present a field-tested “medium-n” qualitative comparative methodology, which enhances understanding of the strong and fluid influence of gender norms on processes of local agricultural innovation in the Global South. The GENNOVATE approach (“Enabling Gender Equality in Agricultural and Environmental Innovation”) weaves together three broad metho...

This paper employs the concepts of gender norms and agency to advance understanding of inclusive agricultural innovation processes and their contributions to empowerment and poverty reduction at the village level. We present a community typology informed by normative influences on how people assess conditions and trends for village women and men to...

Global climate policies recognize the urgent need to address the inequitable impacts of climate change on smallholder agricultural communities, but there is limited understanding of how to accomplish this in practice. We contribute to closing this gap through the design of a participatory qualitative methodology intended to nurture locally-led “tra...

This article pulls together the state of knowledge on the degree to which wheat-based systems in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan, are feminizing. It is not yet possible to make definitive statements. However, it is clear that wheat-based systems are undergoing far-reaching changes in relation to “who does what” and “who decides.” There are s...

We examine young people’s testimonies about their capacity to make important decisions and their livelihood experiences from agricultural communities that span Pakistan’s countryside. Our analysis is guided by theories of agency that focus on how a young person’s capacity to identify and act on goals is mediated by their local opportunity structure...

Livestock have strong empowerment potential, particularly for women. They offer millions of women in the Global South the opportunity to provide protein-rich foods for home consumption and sale. Livestock provide women with income and opportunities to expand their livelihood portfolios and can strengthen women’s decision-making power. Fully realizi...

Sustainable agricultural development depends on female and male smallholders being effective farmers. This includes the ability to access or control resources and make the best decisions possible agro-ecologically, economically, and socially. Traditionally, gendered studies on innovation practice focus on female- versus male-headed households. In t...

The poverty dynamics of a community, and the social arrangements and opportunities that shape these dynamics, constitute important dimensions of well-being. This paper explores local understandings of and experiences with moving out of poverty and with remaining poor by employing the concept of gender norms, or the various social rules that differe...

Local gender norms constitute a critical component of the enabling (or disabling) environment for improved agricultural livelihoods – alongside policies, markets, and other institutional dimensions. Yet, they have been largely ignored in agricultural research for development. This viewpoint is based on many years of experience, including a recent m...

We introduce the concept of local normative climate to improve understanding of communitylevel social processes that shape women’s and men’s sense of agency and capacities for taking important decisions, including in their agricultural livelihoods. The idea of normative climate is informed by feminist literature that addresses concerns for the cont...

We outline a data collection method that features a vignette approach to understand the factors and processes shaping household production, exchange, and consumption. The tool maps the engagement of household members along the nutrition pathway, beginning at the post-harvest or food purchase stage.

The Ladder of Power and Freedom module is a tool designed to provide numerical and narrative data on perceptions of the capacities of local men and women to exercise agency and make major decisions in their lives. The module features four questions and two interactive ranking exercises for either focus group or semi-structured interview instruments...

This report examines the gender dimensions of agricultural innovation and wider social change. The findings are based on the perspectives and experiences of approximately 1,600 women and men who reside in 27 villages of Ethiopia, Malawi, Mexico, Nigeria, Nepal, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe where maize is a key crop. This study is part of the wider GENNOV...

This report illuminates how gender norms and agency work together to shape access to, adoption of, and benefits from agricultural innovation at the local level. The findings are based on the perspectives and experiences of approximately 2,500 women and men who live and work in 43 villages of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, India, Morocco, Nepal,...

This chapter describes shifts in gender roles and agency during times of conflict, noting that the changes men and women experience are interdependent and arguing that a conflict period may offer a window of opportunity to speed up normative social change. The chapter describes how qualitative data from multiple conflict sites illustrate that while...

The challenge of engaging the youth in the legumes and cereals value chains in the drylands remains under represented because very little quantitative and qualitative research has been carried out on aspirations of the youth in these systems. By utilizing the GENNOVATE methodology, with a specific aim of exploring with the youth about the community...

New qualitative fieldwork in eight countries of Europe and Central Asia (ECA) indicates that the dramatic declines in poverty in much of the region over the last decade do not appear to be registering very favorably with men and women on the ground. They express deep concerns about deteriorating work opportunities, a disappearing middle class and r...

Why are some communities peaceful while others struggle with persistent crime and violence? This background note presents a relatively new and insightful comparative case study literature that seeks to explain this variance. Much of the recent work on community violence favors interactional arguments, an approach that traces risks of violence to th...

This paper brings together the concepts of social norms and innovation diffusion to assess two community development projects with gender targets. The projects failed to meet their objectives although they embodied leading global ‘good practices’ for community-based participatory approaches. In order to succeed, the projects needed to reach and emp...

This study draws on a large qualitative dataset from Afghanistan, Liberia, Sudan and West Bank and Gaza to explore the effects of violent armed conflict on gender norms, men's and women's perceptions of agency and empowerment, and the strong normative frameworks that surround economic participation. The findings reaffirm the sharply different effec...

Drawing on the World Bank’s Moving Out of Poverty dataset, this study explores the life stories of 125 women who have lived through violent political conflict in four middle-income countries.1 The report attempts to qualitatively assess the factors shaping women’s empowerment and community recovery after conflict in order to support broad recommend...

Most conflict studies focus on the national level, but this volume focuses on the community level. It explores how communities experience and recover from violent conflict, and the surprising opportunities that can emerge for poor people to move out of poverty in these harsh contexts. Rising from the Ashes of Conflict reveals how poor people’s mobi...

Democracy is the leader elected by the people. When people of all castes can work together and the rich and poor get similar justice, it is democracy. —Men's discussion g rou p , Uttar Pradesh The worst time in my life was the flood in the year 2000. At this flood, our land was submerged for so long that the entire crop was damaged. We had taken a...

From the eradication of foot binding to foot pedaled water pumps, from the Pill to property rights, innovation can transform women’s lives. Virtuous circles of change can be sparked by women’s use of a seemingly simple technology; a shift in social attitudes about what is possible for women; or increased access for women to economic opportunities,...

This volume brings together multidisciplinary perspectives on poor people’s mobility, a dynamic approach that hopefully will add to our understanding of how and why people move into and out of poverty. The contributors’ findings about mobility patterns, factors, and processes are rich, insightful, and important. The chapters draw on the latest lon...

The theory and empirics of why someone moves out of poverty and stays out of poverty, while others remain in chronic poverty, are still in their infancy. Debates rage about how many people are poor, how to measure poverty over time, and what causes poverty. This book is about these debates and their consequences for policy.

This book, the last volume in a three-part series, draws on a large-scale worldwide poverty study to present the views, experiences, and aspirations of poor people in 14 selected countries. In each country, interviews and discussion groups were held in 8-15 rural and urban communities that reflected the most prevalent poverty groups and the diversi...

Voices of the Poor consists of three books that bring together the experiences of over 60,000 poor women and men. The first book, Can Anyone Hear Us? is based on the voices of over 40,000 poor women and men in 50 countries from the World Bank's participatory poverty assessments. The second book, Crying Out for Change, draws material from a new 23-c...

As the second book in a three-part series entitled Voices of the Poor, " Crying out for Change " accounts for the voices from comparative fieldwork among twenty three countries. Through participatory, and qualitative research methods, the book presents very directly, poor people ' s own voices, and the realities of their lives. It outlines the mult...

Following up on the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development requires greatly expanded development cooperation and new operational mechanisms. This essay assesses the international institutional capabilities that now exist for carrying through on the UNCED commitment of assistance for sustainable development and proposes policy changes for...

Environmental degradation and widespread poverty in cities of the developing world are becoming closely intertwined in particular geographic areas with vulnerable environmental conditions. Nearly 130 million of the ‘hungry poor’ populations live in or around the core of cities. These people are increasingly clustering in crowded squatter settlement...