Category Archives: Rural Development

Diverse Rural Identities and Politics of Belonging: Innovation, Intersections, and Entrepreneurship in Rural and Agricultural Territories

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Date: Thursday 15 October, 10.00–12.30
Location: Aurora B 9216, Wageningen University & Research

How can research and policy better recognise diverse rural and agricultural women’s identities, agency and perspectives on innovation and entrepreneurship?

On Thursday 15 October, Wageningen University & Research will host the interactive and interdisciplinary colloquium Diverse Rural Identities and Politics of Belonging: Innovation, Intersections, and Entrepreneurship in Rural and Agricultural Territories.

The session is organised in the context of the International Year of the Woman Farmer and Rural Women’s Day.

Women-led innovation and entrepreneurship

International research projects on women-led innovation and entrepreneurship in agriculture and rural areas that were recently finalised provide the starting point for the session.

These projects provide ample evidence of women’s own notions and agency around innovation and entrepreneurship. Covering diverse geographical contexts across the globe, they also show how research and policy can better do justice to these perspectives.

The EU projects Grass Ceiling: Gender Equality in Rural and Agricultural Innovation Systems and SWIFT: Supporting Women-led Innovation in Farming Territories, together with the INREF project FermFood, will form the basis for the discussion.

The projects were conducted at Wageningen University & Research, with Bettina Bock, Valentina Materia and Jessica Duncan in the lead.

An interactive session

Following brief presentations of the most striking takeaways from these international projects, the session will move into an interactive group-work set-up.

Participants joining in person will work in groups, while online participants will join through breakout rooms. Together, they will exchange insights and perspectives on new avenues for research and policy to better embed diverse rural and agricultural women’s identities.

Four main questions will kick off the discussions:

  • What from your research or practice resonates or dissonates with the presented takeaways?
  • What accordingly needs to be added or changed in mainstream concepts of innovation and entrepreneurship to better include women’s notions and agency?
  • What might be the underlying root causes to address, and what research or policy can help to leverage these?
  • What ways forward do you see to collaborate and tackle these issues in research and/or policymaking?

Practical information

Date: Thursday 15 October
Time: 10.00–12.30
Location: Aurora B 9216, Wageningen University & Research
Participation: Free and open to all interested

We prefer participation in person. An online link will mainly be available for participants joining from abroad.

Please register for updates, further details and a calendar invitation via this link.

Further details will be shared with those who register.
Please feel free to forward this invitation to anyone who might be interested.

Standing in Solidarity with Palestinian Farmers in the Occupied West Bank

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This blog was written by Eleni, a student of Wageningen University who traveled to Palestine at the end of last year to support the olive harvest. In this blog, she reflects on her experiences and shares her thoughts on the responsibility of Wageningen University.

While media attention had been focused on the ongoing genocide in Gaza, media coverage has been minimal in covering increased Israeli military incursions and settler violence in the West Bank, which is home to nearly three million Palestinians. Many of them are being forcibly displaced either due to settler violence attacks or the demolition of their homes by Israeli military forces as part of Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing plan of the West Bank.

With more than 500,000 Israelis illegally (under international law) living within the West Bank in settlements and outposts, Israeli settlers are encouraged to destroy Palestinian property, olive groves, and kill animals and civilians. This systematic violence is backed by the Israeli government and often occurs under military protection. I experienced a fragment of this violence during my stay in Palestine.

At the end of October 2025, I visited the West Bank together with my friend Claire. We volunteered at the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), a Palestinian agricultural organization affiliated with numerous international networks, among them the ‘La Via Campesina’ network. As volunteers, we joined UAWC’s annual olive harvest campaign called “BAQA” (بَقاء), meaning ‘to remain’ in Arabic—expressing steadfastness, rootedness, and resistance against the occupation and colonizer’s violence.

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New article co-published with RSO thesis student on the politics of food loss in Indonesian value chains

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!!New publication based on the RSO thesis of Astrid Olaerts!!

Food loss in horticultural values chains is a key challenge for regional development in Global South. Yet, existing literature tends to focus on the instrumental factors behind food loss, posing technical interventions. In this new article published in Australian Geographer, we argue that we need to understand food loss through a socio-political lens. Applying such a lens to a case study of horticulture values chains in Lembang, Indonesia, the article argues that food loss is shaped by the power dynamics between different actors in interconnected market channels, including the unfair quality standards and trading practices imposed by powerful firms like supermarkets. Producers and other less powerful actors demonstrate resilience in navigating these power imbalances, however they also struggle to mitigate food loss. The article suggests several strategies that could be adopted to empower marginalised actors and reduce and prevent food loss.

You can find the article here https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00049182.2025.2597081

Congratulations to Astrid for the publication of this important work!

Agricultural Innovation and Social Sustainability: Gender, Social Reproduction and Labour

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This PhD thesis by Daun Cheong explores why social progress towards gender equality in agrarian societies remains slow by analysing policies, academic research, and empirical evidence of farmers’ lived experiences and their interrelationships, paying particular attention to the relationship between agricultural innovation and gendered agrarian labour.

It examines the impacts of innovation that extend beyond the technical and material, investigating the reconstruction and renegotiation of gender and labour dynamics, which ultimately shape the lived experiences of subsistence farmers. By employing post-structuralist feminist approaches, including feminist critical discourse analysis, social reproduction, and capabilities framed as relational autonomy, the thesis demonstrates the gender discourses produced by policies and research, the new subjectivities they construct and frame, and the processes through which they shape reality. Empirically, the research adopted a mixed method approach including micro-focus group discussions, surveys, key informant interviews, and systematic document reviews focusing on women subsistence farmers in Nepal’s Terai region.

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Smallholder farming in Western Bahia, Brazil

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Álvaro Schwartz Micheletti

In my MSc thesis, I studied smallholder farming in Western Bahia, a region marked by the expansion of intensive soy production in the Brazilian Northeast. As a part of the area known as MATOPIBA (standing for the parts of the states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia covered by the cerrado savannah), Western Bahia has been a crucial space for Brazilian agribusiness development since the 1980s, as it offered abundant land with unclear land titling and high agronomic potential.

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