Ester Boserup’s Legacy on Sustainability

Largely unfettered by disciplinary dogma, Ester Boserup observed human-environment relationships through an expansive analytical lens. Her ideas on agricultural change, gender, and development shook up research and practice in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, and remain cogent one-half century later for the development dimensions of sustainability. In this, the 100th year since her birth, it is worthwhile to take stock of her impact on research and practice and how her ideas continue to shape and be reshaped by current research.

Ester Boserup was famous in the scientific community during the 1970s and 1980s, but less is known about the last decade of her life. This chapter intends to give an idea of her thinking in the 1990s. It is interesting to see how she reconsidered her work and career during that period. Based on a series of personal conversations and on two remarkable publications of her last years, we can try to look at Boserup’s work with her own eyes. It becomes clear that she saw herself in a position apart from the main currents of economics also at the end of her life, when she had received much formal appreciation from the scholarly world. With Boserup, clarification, coherence, and interdisciplinarity were more than academic battle cries. They formed a life experience deeply linked to her way of “finding out”.

This chapter is devoted to the core theoretical propositions unfolded in E. Boserup’s 1981 book Population and Technological Change and represents an attempt to take these ideas further. The 1981 book makes an effort to provide a theoretical explanation for the full course of human history, from hunting and gathering communities through various stages of agricultural societies right into the industrial transformation. First we re-examine her own data, confirming her core thesis about average agricultural output per area risingwith population density at the expense of declining output per labour hour, but demonstrating a strong discontinuity at the industrial end of her technology scale.Clearly, what is measured at this end, the transition to fossil fuel use in agriculture, leads to saving labour. Second, we explain our theory of sociometabolic regime transitions and try to show how much this theory learned from Boserup. This theory, though, supposes that it makes a fundamental difference if societies base practically all of their processes on solar energy, its conversion into plant biomass and, consequently, on agriculture as the key energy supply sector, or if they base their processes on fossil fuel energy sources – this is a qualitative leap beyond what Boserup introduces as gradual distinctions. In a third part, based on our comparative research on resource use, we elaborate on three examples for the lasting validity of Boserup’s arguments: on the non-linearity between population growth and land requirements, on the transferability of this thesis to other resources as well, and finally on the persistent relevance of population density as key factor allowing for lower resource consumption. This chapter confirms Boserup’s role as an eminent theorist and analyst of the development trajectory of agrarian societies, but also points to her weakness in understanding the industrial transformation.

In this article, we will explore a contemporary coupled human-environmental system on a small island in the South West Pacific with the aim of portraying historical changes in the resource management strategies, notably the agricultural land use, in this former subsistence system.

Land use is a pervasive driver of change in the earth system (Steffen et al., Ambio 36:614–621, 2007; Turner et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104:20666–20671, 2007). Today, the majority of the ice-free terrestrial surface has been affected in one way or another by human land use (McCloskey and Spalding, Ambio 18:221–227, 1989; Sanderson et al., BioScience 52:891–904, 2002), and since the beginning of agriculture, more than one third of all pristine terrestrial ecosystems have been converted to human-controlled, permanently managed ecosystems with fundamentally altered ecological characteristics (Erb et al., Journal of Land Use Science 2:191–224, 2007). By using the land, human societies alter structures and processes in ecosystems and thereby substantially affect global land cover, biodiversity, biogeochemical cycles of carbon, water, nitrogen, and many other patterns and processes, with far-reaching consequences for ecosystems and human well-being (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Ecosystems and human well-being: Current state and trends, 2005). Land use, on the one hand, provides the basis of nutrition, an array of resources and many essential ecosystem services to society. On the other hand, land use is increasingly jeopardising ecosystem functioning and thus threatens the biophysical basis of humanity. This fundamental trade-off related to land use leads to the emergence of an interdisciplinary research agenda, land-system science (Global Land Project, Science plan and implementation strategy. IGBP Report No. 53/ IHDP Report No. 19, 2005), which seeks to improve the observation of land changes as well as the understanding of these changes in a systemic context, including the interactions and feedback loops among social and natural systems (Turner et al., Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 67, 384–396, 2007).

The relationship between humans and their environment underwent a radical change during the last 10,000 years: from mobile and small groups of foragers to sedentary extensive cultivators and on to high-density intensive agriculture-based modern society; these transitions fundamentally transformed the formerly predominantly passive human user of the environment into an active component of the Earth system. The most striking impacts of these global transitions have only become visible and measurable during the last 150 years (Crutzen, Nature 415:23, 2002; Crutzen and Stoermer, IGBP Newsletter 41(1):17–18, 2000). Prior to this time frame, the use of forest resources for metal smelting in early Roman times and the extensive medieval agricultural system had already changed the landscape (Barker, Nature 473:163–164, 2011; Kaplan et al., Quaternary Science Reviews 28(27/28):3016–3034, 2009); the global climate effects of these early extensive cultivation and harvesting practices are still under debate (Kaplan et al., The Holocene 21(5):775–791, 2011; Lemmen, Géomorphologie: relief, processus, environnement 2009(4):303–312, 2010; Ruddiman, Climatic Change 61(3):261–293, 2003; Stocker et al., Biogeosciences 8:69–88, 2011).

Soil degradation is one of the consequences of farming activity that has had the greatest impact on the capacity of agro ecosystems to produce food and offer environmental services. This risk is threatening the Mediterranean basin as one of the principal factors of non-sustainability. In recent decades, the expansion of olive growing has exacerbated the problem in the Mediterranean region. Although the natural phenomena responsible for the process of soil degradation seem clear, debate remains regarding its social causes. The primary objective of this chapter, based on the evidence of severe degradation of Mediterranean soils, is to analyse its historic dimension through a case study performed in a mountainous area of southern Spain (Montefrío, Granada), in which to identify the causes and thereby contribute to the on-going debate regarding management approaches and soil degradation on a global scale, where the work of Boserup has been so influential. Our case study, which spans two and a half centuries (1750-present day), examines whether population growth was among the primary factors in the transformation from pre-industrialised to industrialised agriculture, with its consequent environmental impacts. In the light of the transition towards sustainable agriculture, understanding the vital role played by population size and dynamics is crucial, especially if approached on a global scale, given that the population of the planet is constantly growing.

This contribution investigates the role of working time in the course of agricultural development. In so doing, we revisit Ester Boserup’s (1965, 1981) hypothesis of increasing land productivity at the expense of declining labour productivity as a consequence of agricultural intensification in subsistence communities. We introduce a theoretical framework that centres on human time as a ‘limited’ biophysical resource and compare the labour burden across gender and age of four subsistence communities, one each from India, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Laos. While Boserup’s claim applies to early stages of agricultural development, we find the dynamics to change with the introduction of fossil fuel based inputs into agriculture, leading to a rise in labour productivity. Despite these improvements, we still find overall labour needs to increase with agricultural intensification. Since household labour remains largely constant during the development process, the labour burden is primarily borne by women.

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.

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?