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The merit of Ester Boserup (The conditions of agricultural growth: the economics of agrarian change under population pressure, 1965; Woman’s role in economic development, 1970) in showing the neglect, or “invisibility”, of women’s work and the gendered differences in agricultural systems and transformation processes lies in having eyes opened to a completely new perspective in many areas of development. It also originated inter- and transdisciplinary debates between (agricultural) economists and social scientists and between liberal, feminist or structuralist approaches. Regardless of her various critics, I think that she has influenced future debates about what can be analysed as the gendered “structuration” (Giddens, The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration, 1984) of rural economic production and society, which is rarely done in any other work. My guess is that many different approaches to rural development have, in some way, reacted to her hypotheses or developed contrasting concepts, even if this was not explicitly the case. In my view, these debates can be complemented and driven further by the thesis of the on-going informalisation of various gendered social and rural institutions, especially in Africa.

In her seminal findings on female neglect in rural North India, based on the census from 1961 and literature studies, the anthropologist Barbara Miller detected a strong correlation between neglect of daughters, agricultural production and the cost of marriage (Miller, The endangered sex: Neglect of female children in rural North India, 1981). She also found significant regional and social variations between the South and the North. In examining studies from throughout India, she observed a pattern in which exceedingly high cost of marriages of daughters among upper social groups in the North corresponded with son preference and high female juvenile mortality, whereas the figures for the South indicated much more equal conditions. With agricultural production and the demand for female labour as the motivating factor, she observed a North/South dichotomy, expressed as “masculinism” in the North, with dry-field plough cultivation and a low demand for female labour, and “feminism” in the South where swidden and wet rice cultivation accompanied a high demand for female labour (Miller, The endangered sex: Neglect of female children in rural North India, 1981, p. 27 f.). Ester Boserup discovered a similar pattern dividing the subcontinent in female participation in farming, with much higher female participation in the South than in the North (Boserup, Woman’s role in economic development, 1970, p. 59 f.). Miller further found that the Himalayan region of Northern India did not fit the geographical dichotomy between the North and the South. Her study showed that, although geographically belonging to the North, the mountainous region was in some cultural ways more akin to the South, including a high participation of women of cultivator families in agricultural work in the Himalayan area (Miller, The endangered sex: Neglect of female children in rural North India, 1981, p. 108; cf. Agarwal, A field of one’s own: gender and land rights in South Asia, 1994, p. 358).

This chapter highlights the relevance of Ester Boserup’s hypotheses for women’s empowerment in Africa and thereby reassessing the status of African women in contemporary time. The chapter attempts to answer the following questions: Does gender inequality persist in Africa, and, if so, are the factors sustaining the inequality the same as those identified by Boserup? For this purpose, relevant indicators were compared and contrasted for a total of 48 Sub-Saharan countries at different points in time, spanning the period from 1995 to 2005. The indicators taken into consideration were the Human Development Index (HDI), the Gender Inequality Index (GII), the Total Fertility Rate (TFR), and the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in absolute and per capita terms. The result found a negative correlation between per capita GDP and both the total fertility rate and the gender inequality index. It also found that the higher the human development index, the lower the total fertility rate and vice versa. Thus, revisiting the Boserupian model in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa has provided us with insights about the interrelationships between gender, population, and development. Since Sub-Saharan Africa is less industrially developed, has the highest fertility rate, and has a wider gender gap than other regions around the globe, the attainment of the MDGs (particularly goal 3) is crucial for Africa.

This chapter focuses on the contemporary debate surrounding large-scale land deals (also called “land grabs”), an issue that is at the intersection of two themes central to Boserup’s oeuvre, specifically her work on agricultural intensification and her work on gender and rural development. In this chapter, Boserup’s theories of agricultural intensification and of gender in rural development are used to shed light on aspects of large-scale land deals that have thus far received scant attention. The chapter begins with a brief summary of Boserup’s views on agricultural intensification and of her work on gender in rural development, followed by background information on the contemporary wave of large-scale land deals. Large-scale land deals are then presented as a contemporary example of intensification, leading to a discussion of which aspects of Boserup’s theory remain relevant and which are problematic in the present-day context. Boserup’s work on gender is then discussed in the context of large-scale land deals to highlight the necessity of including gender in any discussion of land acquisition.

In this chapter, we present evidence of two gendered agricultural asset shifts associated with labour out-migration in the municipality of Calakmul, Campeche. The first is a shift in land rights from men to women (wives), which occurred as men’s labour out-migration, largely to the U.S., coincided with the process of land privatisation and the reform of the ejidal system in Mexico. Ejidos are collective land tenure institutions dating back to the Mexican Revolution and the redistribution of land in the previous century. The second is a more recent shift—one that entails the labour migration of younger single women (daughters) from ejidal villages to nearby cities, the generation of cash earnings, and the subsequent household acquisition of land and cattle back in their home villages. Although Mexico initiated a process of ejidal land parcelisation and privatisation in the mid-1990s (De Janvry and Sadoulet, Mexico’s second agrarian reform: Household and community responses, 1997), the ejido remains the most important institution of community organisation and smallholder land tenure in Calakmul (Haenn, Land Use Policy 23:136–146, 2006). Therefore, we focus on the ejidal sector to understand the dynamics of gendered changes in agricultural assets and labour out-migration for smallholder, semi-subsistence households in southeastern Mexico. Through two stories, we illustrate and assess the sudden and unexpected shifts that can occur in women’s productive asset control (in this case, land and cattle) with different patterns of gendered labour migration. In rural Calakmul, agricultural assets remain central to generating viable livelihoods in the area, even as smallholder agriculture wanes under difficult economic and environmental conditions.

Ester Boserup promoted a focus on women’s role in agriculture as a new perspective through which to understand the link among economic, technological and agricultural development. Her work has been considered a starting point in understanding the importance of women’s role in development globally.

Her work remains important for analysing agricultural development and sustainability issues in Austria today. Time use is a crucial factor when making decisions on production strategies on Austrian farms. Currently, farmers aim to avoid having longer working hours and less income than employees from other sectors. Technological change can diminish the workload of farmers, but it does so mainly in regions that are favourable for large-scale industrialised agriculture. Sustainable agriculture with a focus on mixed production and the maintenance of cultural landscapes in a lively region must be attractive for young people, men and women alike, to keep them working on farms.

The on-going structural change in agriculture, with its implications for ecology and society, is one of the well analysed and documented long-term socioecological changes in Austria. Building models is one way to use this scientific knowledge as well as experts’ and farmers’ expertise for developing future scenarios and regional strategies for sustainable development.

This paper presents an agent-based model with single farm households as agents within the ecological and socio-economical setting of an Austrian region. The model assesses effects on land use patterns and socio-economic conditions induced by changes in the farms’ environment, such as changes in subsidies on the European and national level, changes in agricultural policy and changes in market prices of agricultural products. The decision-making process of each agent is simulated within a “sustainability triangle” of ecological, economic and social dimensions. Time-use data are used to integrate a gender perspective in the decision tree of farms, which was developed in a participatory process with agricultural experts and farm women of the region.

Three scenarios were developed and analysed, as follows: a trend scenario, a globalisation scenario and a sustainability scenario. The current problems of decreasing farm activities and increasing forests could be reduced at a certain level with the measures assessed in the sustainability scenario. However, as the model results show, in the sustainability scenario the unequal distribution of workload on women farmers would increase. This result must be considered when thinking about ways to enhance the success of any effort towards sustainable development.

With her pioneering comparative studies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which were published as (1970), Boserup provided empirical evidence of the importance of women in agricultural activities and rural development. Analysing gender order, particularly in rural areas, needs to consider access to productive resources, technological development, population growth, division of labour and the productivity gap that effect changes in women’s status in society and their scope of action.

The article combines Ester Boserup's research with human ecological approaches referring to Duncan's ecological complex and the human ecological pyramid. It intrdoduces an engendered human-ecological concept.

In this concluding chapter, we repeat and try to answer the book’s core questions: In what regards was Ester Boserup a visionary? How has her work become pointof departure for following generations of scientists? How did her work influence the authors‘ own research agenda? In what ways has later research transgressed or contradicted her approaches? And finally: How can her work be used to enhance sustainability science today?