Gender equality in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) has been a development goal since the 1990s. Although progress has been made in reducing gender gaps, gender inequalities, mostly against women, persist. In rural and agricultural settings in LMICs, women have less decision-making authority over arable land, less access to agricultural inputs, and more poverty time –deprivation of free time or leisure due to unpaid and paid labor activities-- compared to their male counterparts. Therefore, Sustainable Development Goal 5 on Gender Equality is far from being accomplished by 2030, as agreed in 2016 by the international community.Therefore, scholars and practitioners in gender and development are calling for the urgency of transforming one of the main roots of gender inequalities: the gender structures of constraint (gender norms and rules). However, little has been done to understand the how of that transformation. This dissertation includes one theoretical and two empirical research articles. It delivers insights into the gender and development literature on transformation and recommendations to development practitioners. The first article proposes a theoretical framework for gender and development scholars and practitioners to examine gender structure transformations amid implementing development programs in LMICs. This framework integrates the literature on rural women’s empowerment in the Gender and Development (GAD) school of thought and Feminist Political Ecology (FPE). In this article, I compare the concepts of gender, power, and transformation in both literatures and propose the Women’s Empowerment for Gender-Transformative Development Framework. The second article implements the theoretical framework proposed in the first article. The objectives of this article are a) to examine how women and men challenge gender norms when they receive resources from a development program; and b) to identify the potential negative consequences when women and men challenge norms due to their participation in the program. To do that, I implement a content analysis from 65 semi-structured interviews with rural women and men participating in Empropaz, a nationwide entrepreneurship program with a gender focus in Colombia. The results show that women and men challenged gender norms by enhancing their self-esteem, sense of agency, control over resources, and family cooperation. However, collective power was less prevalent. The resources provided by Empropaz enabled individuals to have new thoughts and perform new actions that defied traditional gender expectations. Despite these gains, a few participants continued to experience verbal gender-based violence, heightened family conflict, and decreased life balance. The third article is an in-depth intra-household analysis of gendered dynamics. It provides evidence of the role of power legitimacy for women having decision-making authority over agricultural land. Based on GAD literature, it identifies the association of power legitimacy and other social factors (e.g., access to land and education) in explaining spousal discord or accord on who within the household makes decisions over the land. The study’s objectives are: a) to understand women’s participation in decisions within the household, both domestic and agricultural, compared to their male counterparts; b) to identify the role of legitimacy factors in determining women’s participation in agricultural decisions; c) to identify the role of other social factors in determining women’s decision; and d) to identify the role of legitimacy factors in women’s and men’s discord in their survey’s responses. I implemented a firth logit and a multinomial logistic regression based on an intra-household survey (responded by the woman and man head of the household separately) with 147 households producing cashews in Honduras. The results show that a legitimacy factor – the women feeling comfortable having different opinions with their male partner – positively and significantly affects women’s decision-making authority. Similarly, land ownership, contribution to on-farm labor in cashew production, participation in other crops and animals, and having more education than their male counterparts positively and significantly affect women’s decision-making authority over cashews plots. The aforementioned legitimacy factor is also positively associated with women and men having the same opinion that women participate in the decisions over the land. The dissertation concludes that it is important for rural development to support women and men in challenging gender norms, and for couples to address conflicts and differing opinions, to achieve SDG 5 in Latin America. Research that merges GAD and FPE can highly contribute to this endeavour.
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