The influence of cooperative and gendered discourse upon women empowerment in the coffee value chain: a comparative study of coffee cooperatives in Aceh, Indonesia

The literature on global value chain (GVC) has shown that women are usually concentrated at the bottom of the chain with low-rewarding positions. In the context of coffee small-holder producers, women mainly work in harvesting and sortation. Women also have limited access to the decision-making process and benefits of coffee cooperatives (knowledge, train-ings, network, premium, etc.). This research investigates the extent to which cooperative characteristics and sociocul-tural contexts influence women’s empowerment in coffee cooperatives. It examines women-exclusive cooperatives and mix-member cooperatives in Gayo, Aceh, Indonesia as a com-parative case study and includes interviews with women workers from four different coop-eratives with different roles (farmers, sortation workers, collectors, and exporters). The data is analysed through the concepts of power, agency, resources, achievements, and intra-house-hold bargaining. The women-only producer cooperative (WEPGY) demonstrates the most transforma-tive change regarding women’s empowerment as evident by a better distribution of women roles along the chains. Cooperative’s establishment background, leadership, and exposure to GVC networks also determine the different trajectories of women empowerment. Further-more, the study also discusses dominant gendered discourses and how they influence ambi-guities in women’s empowerment process. It invites readers to reflect on women’s empow-erment beyond clear-cut indicators and situate it within a wider institutional context. Finally, it concludes that the notion of women’s empowerment needs to be directed at challenging the unequal gendered power relations in the household, community, and value chain gov-ernance.