“Value Grabbing”: A Political Ecology of Rent

Andreucci, Diego; García-Lamarca, Melissa; Wedekind, Jonah; Swyngedouw, E

doi:10.1080/10455752.2016.1278027

Cited by 181 publications

(211 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…Instead, most microfinance institutions would prefer to keep their clients and have them make monthly interest payments. This outcome fits with how finance capital usually extracts surplus value through rent and interest payments (Andreucci et al., ). In the case of microfinance, the loan contract is a highly flexible mechanism of surplus value extraction because borrowers self‐discipline themselves in ways that are often more efficient than the direct seizure of people's land (Mader, ; Roy, ).…”

Section: Turning Land Into a Financial Assetsupporting

confidence: 71%

From rice fields to financial assets: Valuing land for microfinance in Cambodia

Green

2019

Trans Inst British Geog

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Funding information Fulbright IIE Student Program; Center for Khmer StudiesThis paper explores how rural land in Cambodia has been incorporated into global networks of finance capital through the technical and political processes of turning land into a financial asset. Since the 1990s, the Cambodian government and international development institutions have issued land titles to people to formalise land ownership and increase people's access to formal credit. At the same time, Cambodia's commercial microfinance industry has rapidly grown to become one of the largest markets in the world per capita. The industry has expanded in part because microfinance institutions use land title for collateral on household loans as a method to manage the financial risk of their foreign investors and shareholders. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic research conducted with ACLEDA Bank, Cambodia's largest provider of microfinance loans, to examine how the rural land market and microfinance sector are assembled together. I argue that microfinance markets in Cambodia depend on credit officers establishing a capitalist regime of land value. To do so, credit officers engage in daily bricolage, using technologies of representation and data inscription, to create new grids of land evaluation that allow people to treat their land as a financial asset. I also argue that collateral is a kind of technology of control that reworks and respatialises household social reproduction for the benefit of financial accumulation. This paper thus contributes to our theoretical understanding of how land, labour, and finance capital are assembled together, and the political economic ramifications of such an assemblage.

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Section: Turning Land Into a Financial Assetsupporting

confidence: 71%

From rice fields to financial assets: Valuing land for microfinance in Cambodia

Green

2019

Trans Inst British Geog

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“…There has been a recent wave of strong research on questions of value and rent in contemporary capitalism from scholars working within or adjacent to the field of political ecology. This makes sense considering the materialist approach taken to issues such as the governance of land, distribution of resources, and interconnection of social, environmental, and technological systems (Andreucci et al ; Loftus ; Monstadt ). More specifically, much of this work has focused on understanding the multiplicity of ways that nature and/or conservation are (becoming) thoroughly financialised (Bryant ; Dempsey and Suarez ; Sullivan ).…”

Section: Platforming Rent Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Internet of Landlords: Digital Platforms and New Mechanisms of Rentier Capitalism

2020

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Digital platforms are a nearly ubiquitous form of intermediary and infrastructure in society. By positioning platforms in the geographical political economy/ ecology literature, this paper provides a critical analysis of platforms as a dominant form of rentier in contemporary capitalism. In doing so, I extend this work on rent theory beyond applications to land and nature so that it also includes platforms and data. I argue that the rapid rise of the "X-as-a-service" business model across nearly all sectors of the economy is creating rentier relations by another name. This model is premised on the platform latching onto and inserting itself into the production, circulation, or consumption process, thus creating opportunities to capture value. To better understand the operations and implications of platforms, I outline three key mechanisms: data extraction, digital enclosure, and capital convergence.

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“…The institutionalization of property regimes creates new terrain for rent extraction and consequently animates struggles over the distribution of value amongst the different classes of actors involved. The state has been identified as a key actor in the appropriation of value through rent in its various roles as the creator of property institutions, the regulator of land titles and markets, and the landlord exercising de facto ownership of resources (Andreucci et al ., ). In institutionalizing property rights as well as the rules and governing frameworks that enable rent to be extracted, the state is central to the politics of value grabbing.…”

Section: Land Commodification and The Politics Of Value Grabbingmentioning

confidence: 97%

Accumulation without Dispossession? Land Commodification and Rent Extraction in Peri‐urban China

Kan¹

2019

Int J Urban Regional Res

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The urbanization of rural China is increasingly achieved not through physical land grabs but the strategic enrolment of rural communities in the commodification of land via speculative rentiership. This article critically examines this shift in approach from the deployment of extra-economic force in state-led land expropriations toward an increasing reliance on market mechanisms in land development. A case study, the construction of a financial district in peri-urban Guangzhou, shows that the enrolment of village communities is achieved through their cooptation as corporatist market players in regimes of rent-based accumulation. While the apparent use of voluntaristic market exchange has reduced the need for coercion, however, the commodification process has at the same time created new terrain for dispossessory practices whereby value is illicitly extracted and seized by elites through rent relations. The shift from overt land grabbing to more covert mechanisms of value appropriation has important implications for rural class relations and contentious politics.

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“Value Grabbing”: A Political Ecology of Rent

Cited by 181 publications

References 56 publications

From rice fields to financial assets: Valuing land for microfinance in Cambodia

From rice fields to financial assets: Valuing land for microfinance in Cambodia

The Internet of Landlords: Digital Platforms and New Mechanisms of Rentier Capitalism

Accumulation without Dispossession? Land Commodification and Rent Extraction in Peri‐urban China

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