The Political Construction of Wasteland: Governmentality, Land Acquisition and Social Inequality in South India

Abstract

Through a micro-level study of a biofuel-related land acquisition in rural Tamil Nadu, India, this article reveals how state-subject relations are shaping modern land deal politics. Through its political construction of the concept of 'wasteland' and its associated wasteland development programme, the Indian state has facilitated a series of questionable land acquisitions, reshaping agrarian livelihoods in the process. A class of land brokers has emerged to help carry out the state's project of converting 'wastelands' to more 'productive', state-defined uses such as biofuel cultivation and industrial expansion. Those whose lands have been acquired as part of these programmes have undergone a transition to wage labour, increasing the prolitarianization of agrarian communities. By documenting the mechanics of this 'wasteland governmentality', this study contributes to a political sociology of the state by unpacking the linkages between the state and agrarian subjects in the context of the 'global land grab'. Development and Change 44(2): 409-428.

Coproducing urban space: Rethinking the formal/informal dichotomy

“…The articles in this special section do not frame their analysis along the spatial and temporal lines of urban planning projects but ethnographically engage with the lifeworld of the urban poor. Urban planning often invokes an image of ‘empty space’ and ‘empty time’, as if space was not occupied and used before the timeline of the project started (Raco et al ., ; Baka, ). This perspective renders invisible the people in these areas, their life histories and their social configurations.…”

Co‐opting Authority and Privatizing Force in Rural Africa: Ensuring Corporate Power over Land and People

“…Margulis et al (:13) go so far as to argue that the current land rush is not about owning, accessing, or utilizing land at all, but simply about “control grabbing.” They argue that the current phenomenon is primarily an effort to ensure future control over land as it is “an important site of new transnational struggles for authority and control over resources and governance” (3). In this sense the contemporary land rush is primarily an attempt to bring under corporate control, even if not under corporate ownership, land that global capital has thus far failed to make productive and which is therefore seen as “unused,” “empty,” “marginal,” “public,” “underutilized,” or “frontier” (see Baka :410; De Schutter :258; Dwyer :318; McMichael :53; Oliveira :264; Scoones et al :473; Verma :66).…”

Untitled

“…Scarcity, in this view, is the result of exclusion and unequal gender, social, and power relations that legitimize asymmetric access to and control over finite resources (Mehta, 2010). Land dispossession, privatization of commons, and even colossal state-driven development projects such as dams, mines, and power plants all can contribute to constructed scarcity that eventually leads to a mass of new prolitarianized urban poor (Baka, 2013;Escobar, 2012). This explains why rich regions in the Indian Subcontinent, Africa, Asia or the Americas are still characterized by huge pockets of poverty despite their enormous natural resources stocks and their ancient and complex agricultural know-how and indigenous knowledge.…”