Governing Global Land Deals: The Role of the State in the Rush for Land

Abstract

Over the past decade, there has been a dramatic increase in large-scale land deals, often from public lands to the hands of foreign or domestic investors. Popularly referred to as a 'global land grab', new land acquisitions are drawing upon, restructuring and challenging the nature of both governance and government. In the Introduction to this special issue, we argue for an analysis of land deals that draws upon the insights of political ecology, cultural politics and agrarian studies to illuminate the microprocesses of transaction and expropriation as well as the broader structural forces at play. We argue that 'the state' is often invoked as a key player in land grabbing but states never operate with one voice; rather we need to unbundle the state, to see government and governance as processes, people and relationships. To develop this approach, we focus on territory, sovereignty, authority and subjects not as static objects but as relationships produced in and through place, property, power and production. Understanding the dynamic nature of these relationships is critical to understanding the highly variable form and content of large-scale land deals in different settings around the world. The papers in this special issue help to develop this perspective and this Introduction highlights important areas of convergence among them.

Smallholder telecoupling and potential sustainability

“…The HLPE uses the definition of smallholders as agricultural land users with holdings smaller than 2 hectares. Periurban populations were estimated by calculating using GIS buffer layers of radius set in direct proportion to the city population and the gridded global population (SEDAC gridded population of the world, V.3; http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/collection/gpw-v3) Globally, the demographic presence of smallholders remains significant notwithstanding the powerful, marginalizing counterforces of land and resource grabs as well as the corporate industrialization of agri-food and resource sectors (Wolford et al 2013, Baird and Fox 2015, Baird 2017. Smallholders are a large, persistent, and internally diverse group that defies overly narrow definition and that overlaps but is not equivalent to the category of family farmers (Turner and Brush 1987, Netting 1993, Darnhofer 2014, van Vliet et al 2015, Graeub et al 2016, Lowder et al 2016.…”

Land-use changes by large-scale plantations and their effects on soil organic carbon, micronutrients and bulk density: empirical evidence from Ethiopia

“…On the one hand, many recipient governments have actively promoted these investments through favourable incentive packages, as a means to contribute to domestic export earnings, capital formation, and rural development objectives. On the other hand, much research has shown that few positive development impacts accrue since the loss of access to land by the rural poor often exacerbates local livelihood and food insecurity and disruptive land use changes for plantation establishment results in numerous negative environmental impacts (see Aklilu and Woldemariam 2009;Shete 2011;Margulis et al 2013;Wolford et al 2013;Moreda 2015;Shete and Rutten 2014, 2015a, 2015b.…”

Ocean grabbing

“…What, then, defines an initiative as ocean grabbing? The extensive critical literature on land grabbing and early discussions of ocean grabbing are instructive here [3][4][5][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]29,30]. For example, these literatures suggest that "grabbing" is facilitated through marginalization of local people, non-transparent or corrupt transactions, subversion of political or democratic processes, physical displacement and violent dispossession, accumulation and exclusion through progressive privatization, producing environmental harms, and undermining food security, among other possibilities.…”

“…The term has emerged following a growing body of literature on land grabbing, which has been used to reference the purchase or expropriation of land (often in distant countries) by transnational or national corporations, governments, individuals or NGOs. These can include 'grabs' of land for fuel, food production, investment, conservation or other purposes e.g., [7,[8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. In the past few years, the term 'ocean grabbing' has come to broadly reference similar concerns as they pertain to the rights and livelihoods of small-scale fishers and vulnerable coastal peoples.…”