Villages, Women, and the Success of Dairy Cooperatives in India: ...

regional identities in India, the diversity of program outcomes is linked to the complex construction of place for dairy development.

Second, to what extent are existing distributions of agricultural resources reflected in the membership of village dairy cooperatives? This emphasis on the agrarian bases of rural development provides insights into the extent to which the access to land is key to enabling economic development in rural India. Thus, cooperative dairying cannot be considered only in terms of linkages between the development program and villages, but has to be viewed also in terms of connections between cooperatives and agricultural fields. An especially important figure in understanding this connection is the crossbred cow, often a cross between European dairy breeds and the Indian zebu, whose links with dairying and agriculture are part of the explanation for its acceptance or rejection in specific contexts.

Third, how do gender divisions of labor shape the ability of households to participate in cooperative dairying? The issue here is that the distribution of tasks between women and men cannot simply be classified as a marker of traditional culture given that the strategic construction of gendered work responsibilities crucially mediates the fit between local livelihoods and development policies. Overall, this book endeavors to reveal that the meanings of cooperative dairying are not just a matter of outcomes and effects related to the program and its varied appearances across rural India, but that they also require an engagement with the construction of the village through place-based political struggles, agrarian resources, and gender divisions of work.

A focus on rural places is extremely pertinent to current understandings of development and inequalities for at least three reasons. First, as approaches to understanding the contemporary human condition become increasingly dominated by notions of globalization, it is useful to reflect on the diversities and inequalities that characterize participation in global flows for specific places and people, and this books aims to draw attention to the “global countryside” in order to balance the plethora of studies on “global cities” (Woods 2007). This is an especially significant task for rural places, given that their futures are constantly being