LDPI Resources
Papers and links to relevant sites
Governing Global Land Deals: The Role of the State in the Rush for Land
Development and Change special issue, March 2013
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. While ‘the state’ is often invoked as a key player in contemporary land deals, states do not necessarily operate coherently or with one voice.
This collection of essays brings clarity and understanding to the entity of ‘the state’, analyzing government and governance as processes, people and relationships. Focusing on relations of territory, sovereignty, authority and subjects, the essays in this collection explore the highly variable form and content of large-scale land deals in different settings around the world, illuminating both the micro-processes of transaction and expropriation, as well as the broader structural forces at play in global land deals. The authors do not assume a priori that there is a necessary character to land deals, rather they frame the deals themselves quite broadly, as embedded in complex multi-scalar webs of relationships shaped by power, property and production.
Land Grabbing and Global Governance
Guest Editors: Matias E. Margulis, Nora McKeon & Saturnino M. Borras Jr.
The issue on land grabbing and global governance contains 14 articles: introductory essay, 8 original research articles and 5 review articles of transnational instruments to regulate land grabs. The special issue analyzes the recent global land rush from a global/transnational perspective and takes into account the ever greater flows of capital, goods, and ideas across borders and that these flows occur through axes of power that are far more polycentric than the North-South imperialist tradition. In addition, the special issue features contributions from scholars and global civil society activists engaged in the present global contests to regulate land grabs in an effort to co-produce and mobilize knowledge. The contribution of the articles in this collection to the broader scholarship on land grabbing is that it provides a framework for analyzing land grabbing as concurrent struggle for control over local pieces of land and transnational regulatory institutions.
For FREE access to selected articles for a limited time, click:
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rglo20/10/1
Land grabbing in Latin America
Special Issue Guest Editors: Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Cristóbal Kay, Sergio Gómez and John Wilkinson
There are eight articles in this Special Issue: seven research articles plus the guest editors’ introductory essay, covering country experiences in Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Guatemala and Mexico. A close reading of the contributions to this Special Issue can contribute important insights into the debate on land grabbing. In addition to introducing a previously under-explored geographic region into the emerging land grab literature, they also provide insights into the distinct political economy of the region that informs the way land grabs actually occur, and are perceived and understood. The contribution of these papers to the broader scholarship on land grabbing can be seen in at least seven ways elaborated in the introductory essay.
The publication of this special issue is co-sponsored by the Transnational Institute (
www.tni.org)
Please find below the token to access the special issue for FREE!
http://www.tandfonline.com/r/rcjd-334
The link takes you to a sign in page where you will need to sign in or register on Taylor & Francis Online to access the content. If you do not currently have an active account then you will first need to register. Please click on the link and then click on ‘Register’ to complete all the required details. You will then have a username/password that you can use to login and access the free content. If you already have an account simply click on the link and sign-in with your username/password. You will be able to access the free content immediately. The token is valid until the 31st May 2013, when the free access will end.
Water grabbing? Focus on the (re)appropriation of finite water resources
Water Alternatives journal has published the first collection on the politics of water grabbing in the context of global land grabbing. All articles are accessible in the website free of charge. The special issue is guest edited by Lyla Mehta, Gert Jan Veldwisch and Jennifer Franco.
Water Alternatives, 5(2), June 2012
Green Grabbing: a new appropriation of nature?
Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(2) special issue
Guest editors: James Fairhead, Melissa Leach and Ian Scoones.
Across the world, ‘green grabbing’ – the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends – is an emerging process of deep and growing significance. In recent years there has been a veritable explosion of scholarship examining the neoliberalization of environments, nature and conservation, drawing partly on older traditions of ecological/green Marxism and critical political ecology. The contributions to this Special Issue are indebted to this work, but also move beyond it, locating the discussions in a particular concern for the implications of changing agrarian relations resulting from these multiple and diverse appropriations of nature.
Please see below the token URL for free access to the 39(2) issue of JPS.
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/fjps20/39/2
If you do not currently have an active account then you will first need to register. Please click on the link above and then click on ‘Register’ to complete all the required details. You will then have a username/password that you can use to login and access the free content.
If you already have an account simply click on the link above and sign-in with your username/password. You will be able to access the free content immediately.
For the complete Table of contents and to see the cover image of the print version, click:
Debating the Global Land Grab
A report was released in 2011 to coincide with the international conference on the global land grab held at IDS, University of Sussex in April 2011.
The Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) Forum on global land grabbing, with three leading commentators, debates on the sometimes hidden impacts of land deals and sets the scene for wider debates at the upcoming conference.
To access the FREE articles
- Klaus Deininger, a senior economist at the World Bank examines the risks associated with single owners of large land holdings and the institutional reforms needed to make land deals successful.
- Olivier de Schutter, the UN Rapporteur for the Right to Food and Professor of Law and Human Rights at the Catholic University of Louvain, promotes small family farms and human rights in the context of contemporary debates on land grabbing.
- Tania Murray Li, Canada Research Chair and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, examines how land deals can lead to dispossession and 'rural exclusion'.
UN report on the global land grab
