“Invisibility and Recognition of Women’s Agricultural Work in the Bengal Delta: Between Empowerment and Constraint” 

Paper presented at the ISWA conference in Bern : https://iswa2026.symposium.inrae.fr/ International Symposium on Work in Agriculture – ISWA in collaboration with Fachausschuss für Arbeitswissenschaften im Landbau and HAFL Cecchini Institute “Addressing current and future challenges of work in agriculture: research, policy and practice” 7-10 July 2026

Emilie CREMIN1, Jinat HOSSAIN2

1 Université de Lausanne, Switzerland;emilie.cremin@gmail.com,

2 Université of Bern, Switzerland; jinat.hossain@geo.uzh.ch

Women’s labour is central to agricultural production in the Bengal delta (India and Bangladesh), yet it remains persistently undervalued, informalised, and rendered invisible within agrarian economies and policy frameworks. This paper examines the specific challenges faced by women engaged in agricultural work in deltaic environments marked by hydromorphological instability, agrarian transitions, and socio-ecological change. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted in the Bengal delta, it analyses how women’s contributions— ranging from farming and aquaculture to resource management and care work—are obscured by gendered divisions of labour, land tenure regimes, and development narratives that privilege male farmers and market-oriented production.

Beyond documenting invisibility, the paper critically engages with processes of (re)recognition promoted through development interventions, state policies, and NGO programmes aimed at empowering women and making their work visible. While recognition can open access to resources, rights, and political voice, it also generates new forms of regulation, surveillance, and normative expectations that may reinforce gendered responsibilities and intensify women’s workloads. The paper highlights this ambivalence, showing how visibility can simultaneously enable recognition and impose new constraints within increasingly technocratic, project-driven governance frameworks.

By situating women’s agricultural labour within the socio-ecological dynamics of the Bengal delta, the paper contributes to feminist political ecology by questioning the assumption that visibility is inherently emancipatory. It argues for a more nuanced understanding of recognition that accounts for power relations, environmental uncertainty, and women’s own strategies of negotiation, partial visibility, and resistance in deltaic agrarian systems.

Keywords: Gender, agricultural labour, environmental justice