Female Leadership in Mexican Agricultural Firms and Its Impact on Sustainability

Abstract

Women-led agricultural enterprises are critical to environmental sustainability and rural development. However, national generalizations obscure how regional disparities, land tenure constraints, and business maturity shape women's strategic environmental choices. Integrating the Natural Resource-Based View (NRBV) with literature on female leadership and regional economic resilience, this study examines subnational typologies of women-led agricultural enterprises in Mexico to address three core questions: (1) how regional structural conditions constrain environmental practice adoption; (2) what leadership strategies women deploy across regions; and (3) how NRBV strategies are operationalized subnationally. Utilizing state-level data from the 2022 Mexican National Agricultural Census (INEGI across 32 federal entities), we performed Principal Component Analysis, Ward’s hierarchical clustering, and K-means clustering. The empirical results reveal significant subnational heterogeneity and identify three distinct territorial typologies: I. Diversified Environmental Practice Territories, characterized by Product Stewardship via adaptive diversification; II. Transitioning Territories, focused on operational Pollution Prevention under capital constraints; and III. Strategic Leadership Territories, aligned with Sustainable Development through long-term risk management. This research extends Hart's NRBV to subnational rural contexts in emerging economies, demonstrating that female leadership acts as an adaptive mechanism that transforms structural constraints into place-based capabilities. Policy-wise, these typologies provide an empirical framework for designing targeted, regionally differentiated rural development interventions.