Land Grabbing and Global Governance: Critical Perspectives

Abstract

Land grabbing has emerged as a significant issue in contemporary global governance that cuts across the fields of development, investment, food security, among others. Whereas land grabbing per se is not a new phenomenon, having historical precedents in the eras of imperialism, the character, scale, pace, orientation and key drivers of the recent wave of land grabs is a distinct historical phenomenon closely tied to major shifts in power and production in the global political economy. Land grabbing is facilitated by ever greater flows of capital, goods, and ideas across borders, and these flows occur through axes of power that are far more polycentric than the North-South imperialist tradition. In this introduction we argue that land grabbing speaks to many of the core questions of globalization studies. However, we note scholars of globalization have yet to deeply engage with this new field. We situate land grabbing in an era of advanced capitalism, multiple global crises and the role of new configurations of power and resistance in global governance institutions. The essays in this collection contribute to identifying land grabbing as an important and urgent topic for theoretical and empirical investigations to deepen our understanding of contemporary globalization and governance.

Surplus, Scarcity and Soil Fertility in Pre-Industrial Austrian Agriculture—The Sustainability Costs of Inequality

“…Similar ideas of co-benefits between peasant autonomy and agro-ecological sustainability were put forward by several other scholars [39][40][41][42][43][44]. In the wake of the global land-grabbing processes of past years, critical agrarian studies have studied the disproportionate accumulation of "empty" and "cheap" land in the hands of a few globalized, corporate agro-businesses or national governments at the expenses of peasant communities, mostly in rural hinterlands of the Global South [45][46][47]. These new dynamics of peasant dispossession and land enclosures not only threaten food security, property relations and income opportunities of indigenous communities, but they also heavily intervene into local land use patterns and agro-ecosystem functions [48].…”

China: Cooperación Sur-Sur y land grabbing. Un análisis desde las resistencias sociales al proyecto Xai-Xai en Mozambique

“…Asimismo, revela aspectos de la globalización económica, ya que es facilitado por flujos cada vez más rápidos y extensos de capitales, bienes e ideas a través de ejes de poder más policéntricos que la tradición Norte-Sur (Margulis, McKeon & Borras, 2013).…”

Emergent Global Land Governance

“…ssue of o global earch by international henomenon (Cotula et al 2009;World Bank 2009;GTZ 2009;Friis and Reenberg, 2010; d arp g of f of numbers to informing actors' entities and preferences (Margulis, McKeon and Borras 2013). Despite these tensions about the …”

“…There is no consensus definition and therefore significant scholarly (and real world political) debate about what is and is not land grabbing (see Margulis, McKeon and Borras 2013). R s of control grabbing that is defined as:…”