Neo-liberal economic agendas are impacting on rural livelihoods and people's attachment to, and functions of, land in rural and non-rural household economies differently in diverse contexts; the present collection of papers explores the gender specificities of these impacts. With the deceleration of more formal forms of employment, the diversification of rural livelihoods, and the intensification of women's unpaid and casual labour in agriculture and the informal sector, the land question has taken on a new urgency and needs to be posed in a new light. Given women's centrality to diversified livelihoods, and their increasing political agency, their interests in land (both as wives/daughters within male-dominated households and as members of vulnerable social classes and communities that face the risk of land alienation and entitlement failure in the context of liberalization) are more politicized today as well as being more contested. The interface between gender and land is contextually specific and cannot be adequately addressed through all-purpose global policy prescriptions. BACKGROUNDThe past two decades have witnessed significant shifts in global development agendas and policies, marked by a resurgence of laissez-faire orthodoxies and a marked ambivalence, if not outright hostility, towards the 'heavy-handed' developmental state. The debt crises of the early 1980s and the subsequent multilateral lending programmes provided a decisive opening for the international financial institutions (IFIs) to impose a neo-liberal agenda of fiscal restraint, open trade and capital accounts, and privatization on indebted developing countries.

This article provides a contextual framework for understanding the gendered dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic and its health, social, and economic outcomes. The pandemic has generated massive losses in lives, impacted people's health, disrupted markets and livelihoods, and created profound reverberations in the home. In 112 countries that reported sex-disaggregated data on COVID-19 cases, men showed an overall higher infection rate than women, and an even higher mortality rate. However, women's relatively high representation in sectors hardest hit by lockdown orders has translated into larger declines in employment for women than men in numerous countries. Evidence also indicates that stay-at-home orders have increased unpaid care workloads, which have fallen disproportionately to women. Further, domestic violence has increased in frequency and severity across countries. The article concludes that policy response strategies to the crisis by women leaders have contributed to more favorable outcomes compared to outcomes in countries led by men.

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