Land grabbing or value grabbing? Land rent and wind energy in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca

Abstract

The Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca is the first region in Mexico with a large-scale wind energy development. The region holds 60% of the country’s installed capacity, but the new infrastructure has faced opposition from sectors of the local population concerned about wind farms’ social and environmental impacts. The opposition and ensuing conflicts have been widely studied; some of these studies have framed wind energy as part of the recent cycle of land grabbing. Nevertheless, this literature has overlooked landholders’ acceptance of wind energy. This paper aims to address this gap and argues that the main driver of the land grabbing process is land rent. The paper draws on recent insights from political ecology that highlight that the commodification of nature is predicated on rent. The paper uses the notion of value grabbing to look at the social struggles over property rights in the Isthmus and the conflicts for the increase and distribution of rents from wind energy.

Introduction: Critical approaches to rentiership

“…Geographers have paid special attention to the extension of these rentier logics in the enclosure of common or collectively held resources, whether natural, social, or epistemic. There has been a particular focus on the “environment” as a site of enclosure and extraction (Alonso Serna, 2022; Andreucci et al, 2017; Kay and Kenney-Lazar, 2017; Purcell et al, 2020). Other analyses have examined the ways that collectively produced outputs of human action are also enclosed or captured via various socio-spatial arrangements, including scientific knowledge, (Zeller, 2008), digital data (Birch et al, 2021), and platforms (Langley and Leyshon, 2017; Sadowski, 2020).…”

Geographies of ground rent: Periodizing ground rent theory, spatializing ground rent refusal

“…This is also of enormous issue when the "small capitalists" are also landowners, as in Ecuadorean cacao production as theorized by Purcell et al (2018: 17): "Thus, opposed to a one-way direct relation of power forcing down producer prices and blocking the upstream transmission of value, the indirect 'asymmetry' which confronts small cocoa producers is their inability to retain a portion of ground rent or even secure normal profits… a small owner producer with more productive land but without the capacity to retain extra value in the form of differential rent or even normal profits, does not capture 'added value,' but only increases the volume of cocoa she can sell at the often depressed market price." Similarly, landowners in the Isthmus of Mexico are gouged by "coyotes"-agents who hunt out deals on rents for large companies, convincing landowners to sign long (sometimes 30-year) lease contracts with extremely unfavorable terms for the landowners (Alonso Serna, 2021). These are also sometimes landowners who rose from ranks of indigenous and mestizo peasants who worked ejido land, rather than long-held aristocracy.…”

“…Elsewhere, residual communal property from socialist or anticolonial regimes is targeted by productive capital, so it can realize high profits in lieu of paying high rents, as in former ejido land in Oaxaca (Alonso Serna, 2021) and land that was nationalized postdecolonisation in Mozambique (Jorge, 2020).…”

New political ecologies of renewable energy

“…Subsequent investigations have explored more concrete workings-out of such fixes in practice (Behrsin, 2019; Spivey, 2020; Palmer, 2021), within unfolding international geographies of renewables investment and development (e.g. research on renewable power from Carton, 2016; Rignall, 2016; Yenneti et al, 2016; Avila-Calero, 2017; Lennon, 2017; Shen and Power, 2017; Curley, 2018; Dunlap, 2018; Cantoni and Rignall, 2019; Mulvaney, 2019; Chien, 2020; Alonso Serna, 2021; Stock and Birkenholtz, 2020; van den Bold, 2021). Other work has taken a more granular view on financial practices and accumulation strategies in renewable project development, including widespread financial exclusion and favoritism, extraction and rentierism.…”