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Sammanfattning

Rwanda is currently undertaking an ambitious development agenda that aims to achieve a structural transition and turn the country into a modern high-income one by 2050. This largely state-led process includes reorganising agricultural land and livelihoods through modernisation policies and interventions across the country, in the countryside as well as in cities. The various changes this engenders have profound implications for the country’s millions of farmers, often in gendered ways and not infrequently to the detriment of less privileged social groups. Within this context, this thesis explores how Rwandan farmers’ gendered and intersectional identities, relations and experiences are shaped through contemporary governmental policies and interventions aimed at agriculture, in the city and in the countryside. It does so by drawing on perspectives in feminist political ecology, gender and development and critical policy studies. Based on analysis of agricultural and urban development policy and on qualitative fieldwork in Kigali, the thesis shows that while policy formulation and implementation to some extent renegotiate and change unequal relations and responsibilities, at least at an individual level, it largely tends to reproduce social difference in ways that rather sustain existing inequalities. The thesis moreover shows how agricultural policy intended for the countryside has gendered effects also in urban Kigali, which highlights how political frameworks, geographically separated in the abstract, in practice are entangled to some extent. The thesis concludes that the prospects for sustained, profound social and gendered change for farmers within Rwanda’s current development agenda remain limited and that further knowledge and debate are needed on the geography and scale of agricultural politics and governance.

Nyckelord

agricultural modernisation; urban development; policy; gender; intersectionality; feminist political ecology; Rwanda; Kigali

Publicerad i

Acta Universitatis Agriculturae Sueciae
2025, nummer: 2025:26
Utgivare: Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

SLU författare

UKÄ forskningsämne

Genusstudier
Utvecklingsstudier

Publikationens identifierare

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.54612/a.7m8mrvi73m
  • ISBN: 978-91-8046-461-1
  • eISBN: 978-91-8046-511-3

Permanent länk till denna sida (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/132966