Shifting the narrative: Women farmers’ agency at the land–labour interface in cocoa production

Résumé fourni par la source

Despite extensive scholarship on gender inequality in West African cocoa production, women's land and labour constraints are often treated as static outcomes rather than dynamic relational processes. This study draws on narrative analysis to examine the everyday experiences of Ivorian women cocoa producers, with particular attention to how access to land and the organisation of labour are co-constituted in practice. Women's participation in the cocoa sector is shaped by intersecting structural and socio-economic constraints: insecure and conditional access to land, limited authority over labour, heavy reproductive workloads, lower educational attainment, and integration into global cocoa value chains that intensify labour demands while limiting recognition and remuneration. These constraints are continually negotiated within households and embedded in hybrid land governance and broader political-economic pressures. These dynamics become particularly visible during moments of household rupture, including widowhood, separation, and conflict with affinal kin, when women's land claims are most vulnerable and their ability to mobilise labour becomes central to maintaining access to land. Despite these constraints, women engage in negotiated practices within and beyond the household, including bargaining over land and labour, crop diversification, cooperative participation, certification engagement, and rights-based sensitisation. These engagements operate simultaneously as livelihood adjustments and political claims to recognition and authority. Their effectiveness remains uneven and contingent, shaped by labour scarcity, tenure insecurity, unequal authority relations, and differentiated exposure to risk within cocoa value chains. By conceptualising the land–labour interface as relational and practice-based, and situating it within the everyday dynamics of social reproduction, this study contributes to debates on gendered agrarian relations in cocoa production.

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