Economist Bina Agarwal, a TWAS Fellow since 2018 and a professor of development economics and environment at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester (UK), has won the First Global Inequality Research Award (GiRA) for 2024/25. She shared the prize with economist James K. Boyce, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, United States.
She was selected for her pioneering work on “gender inequalities, environmental governance, feminist environmentalism and environmental inequalities”, both social and environmental, and received the award at a ceremony held at the Paris School of Economics on 19 March 2025, where she also delivered a lecture titled 'Hidden Inequalities, Visible Outcomes: A Gender Lens'.
Agarwal has conducted pioneering research in agriculture, environmental change, land rights and law, especially through the lens of gender and political economy. Her best-known books are, A Field of One’s Own (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Gender and Green Governance (Oxford University Press (OUP), 2010); Gender Challenges (OUP, 2016) a three-volume collection of her selected papers; andGender Inequality in Developing Economies (2021), available in Italian translation.
Combining academic excellence with policy advocacy, she also led a successful civil society campaign in 2005 to make the Hindu inheritance law gender-equal.
Agarwal has served as director and professor of economics at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi; president of the International Society for Ecological Economics; president of the International Association for Feminist Economics, and vice-president of the International Economic Association. She is also a member of the Italian Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.
The GiRA award is the latest in a long list of honours Agarwal’s has received, including a Padma Shri from India’s President in 2008; three book prizes—the 2010 Leontief Prize “for advancing the frontiers of economic thought”, the Louis Malassis International Scientist Prize (France) for “an outstanding career in agricultural development”, and the 2017 International Balzan Prize for Gender Studies “for challenging established premises in economics and the social sciences by using an innovative gender perspective; for enhancing the visibility and empowerment of rural women in the global South; for opening new intellectual and political pathways in key areas of gender and development”—and the 2023 Kenneth Boulding award in Ecological Economics.
The GiRA is a French biennial prize, jointly established by Sciences Po’s Centre for Research on Social Inequalities and the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics.