Building the Politics Machine: Tools for ‘Resolving’ the Global Land Grab

Abstract

The recent proliferation of transnational land deals has put the long-fraught relationship between international cooperation, national development and local dispossession back in the political spotlight. This article argues that transnational land access cannot be resolved as a political question without a better understanding of the material, legal and administrative geographies that accompany and enable it. Using evidence from Laos, the paper illustrates two tools for 'resolving' the global land grab geographically: first, a biographical or trajectory-based approach that connects specific land grabs to larger development landscapes (e.g. of urban infrastructuring); and second, genealogies of property formalization that interrogate and deconstruct the legal geographies of land access, both on and off the map. The paper concludes by suggesting that these tools have purchase elsewhere as well.

Transnational Farmland Investment: A Risky Business

“…Conversely, permission granted by a central authority failed to hold on the ground (Burnod et al 2013). The situation in Mozambique, Laos and Cambodia is similar (Baird 2013;Dwyer 2013;Fairbairn 2013), and numerous studies of land acquisition for oil palm in Indonesia confirm the contentious status of land law and its deeply conflicted implementation (Colchester et al 2006;Sirait 2009).…”

State Spaces of Resistance: Industrial Tree Plantations and the Struggle for Land in Laos

“…Since the early 2000s, the government of Laos has issued state land concessions for more than one million hectares (ha)-equivalent to 5% of the national territory-to domestic and foreign investors for a wide range of projects, including mining, agriculture and industrial tree plantations (Sch€ onweger et al 2012). The social and environmental implications of these projects have been well documented over the past decade, demonstrating how they dispossess people of their customary lands and resources, pollute surrounding environments, and provide little economic opportunity in the form of wage labour (Baird 2010;Barney 2011;Dwyer 2007Dwyer , 2013Kenney-Lazar 2012;NLMA et al 2009;Obein 2007;Suhardiman et al 2015). Despite the massive enclosure of agricultural and forest lands, however, there appears to be minimal resistance from peasants, and certainly no movement or broad-based social mobilisation, unlike open protests and reactions to land grabbing seen in other countries (Hall et al 2015).…”

“…While the economic growth that followed lent greater popular legitimacy to the state, rapid economic expansion has been largely based on resource extraction (Keovilignavong and Suhardiman 2017), which can threaten such legitimacy because it depends upon the use of so-called state land that rural people have customarily used, claimed, and managed for decades (Barney 2009;Dwyer 2013). The Lao state has sought to develop large-scale concessions in a top-down manner, in which projects are signed by the central government and implemented by the provincial and district governments, with little to no input from affected villagers.…”

Large-Scale Land Acquisitions

“…We now understand that such an approach underestimates the challenges associated with the commodification of land rights: the rolling out of rural property titles in Cambodia launched in 2012, combined with the 'Leopardskin strategy' in the country (in which smallholder farming is supported alongside economic land concessions), testifies to the shift that is now taking place Dwyer, 2013 and. This chapter places this transformation in a historical and global perspective.…”