Land Grabbing and Global Governance: Critical Perspectives
Summary (4 min read)
Introduction
- Over the last few years, land grabbing has become a well-established phenomenon.
- It is useful to develop a more nuanced understanding of new and important sets of transborder flows, power relations, and political struggles that converge where land grabbing occurs and in global-scale governance institutions and practices.
- Globalization and transnational governance scholars have disproportionately paid attention to the recent global financial crisis with little consideration of the other related political economy processes.
- Hence, this collection is sympathetic to a global social justice agenda.
Global Governance and Land Grabbing
- One of the notable developments that followed public awareness of a global land grab in 2008 was the rapid elevation of land grabbing onto the global governance agenda and a flurry of global rule-making projects at various scales involving a multiplicity of actors to regulate land grabbing.
- Meanwhile, dozens of countries are revisiting and reforming national and local land planning and tenure laws as well as their bilateral/multilateral trade, investment and development cooperation arrangements -and depending on the local politics, doing so to either facilitate (Wolford et al., 2013) or limit (Perrone, 2013, this volume; Murmis and Murmis, 2012; Wilkinson et al. 2012 ) land grabbing domestically.
- Like other scholars, the authors recognize the complexity and contradictions bound up with this term/concept and empirical reality (see Wilkinson and Hughes, 2002; Kahler and Lake, 2003) .
Land and Territoriality
- Land at first glance does not easily fit the type of singular issue-areas commonly associated with contemporary global governance.
- Unlike earlier moments of world history the contemporary period of world order is one defined by nation-states as the primary forms of political organization.
- This particular norm and discourse that the land belongs to the state is especially strong in post-colonial states where the state owns most of the land.
- The global land grab raises deeper questions about territoriality in the era of advanced economic globalization.
- Such transformation can be highly destructive to society and citizenship: "Foreign land acquisitions include vast stretches of national territory articulated through villages, smallholder agriculture, rural manufacturing districts, and through the actors that make these economies and reproduce them -whether this is or not recognized by the state.
A Short History of Global Land Governance and Structural Changes in the Global Political Economy
- The post-war interstate system dominated by the United States (US) actively sought to keep the land question out of formal international governance institutions and practices.
- An early effort to establish formal international governance for land took place at the World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development convened by FAO in 1979.
- It is partly the lack of political progress at the international level to advance social justice-oriented redistributive land policies that eventually led to the conditions that gave birth to the 'Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform' by La Via Campesina and its allies.
- This time around, and also in response to the depth of the global food crisis, Gulf States are creating new institutions to coordinate food security policies and land investments, including a mix of public and private ventures.
Governance and Authority
- A number of concepts from global governance scholarship are relevant for the study of land grabbing.
- Simply put, the G8 countries have sought to provide the World Bank with the authority to be the leading agent in this new sphere of governance and they have continued to provide it with resources and entrust it to manage a spate of new global agricultural development programs.
- Global governance scholarship also has examined the shift of authority to non-state actors.
- The emphasis on the CFS work (in the midst of a relative absence of anti-WTO type of mass mobilizations) is politically relevant, and the authors argue that NGOs and transnational agrarian movements are contributing to the creation and contesting emergent global land governance (see also Borras and Franco, 2009) .
- Fortin and Richardson (2013, this volume) argue that private certifications schemes fall short of providing the protection of land rights its champions suggest.
Land Grabbing as Struggles for Control Grabbing and Land Authority
- Indeed, one of the central aims of this collection is to explore different approaches to the study of the global land grab from a perspective that takes seriously insights from work on globalization and governance.
- Land grabbing is making it evident that contests over governance are not limited to the institutions that facilitate specific land deals but in fact are much more expansive and cut across a variety of institutions and practices that go beyond the land registries and the state and extended to transnational actors and global institutions.
- The latter in turn shape what is produced, how it is produced and how production moves across borders.
- In particular, the authors recognize that the contestation of specific land deals and local institutions and practices are more likely to be entangled with one another in a more direct way, the overlap of actors much tighter, and developments of such contests to move much more in parallel at the local/national level.
- This process is highly fluid and the interaction between the local and the global, and the multi-layered and multi-site contests for control of land and institutions is a key dynamic that is shaping this new field of governance.
The Evolving Terrain of Study
- In addition to the themes discussed above there are developments specific to emerging global land governance that warrant further attention and discussion.
- These including the complexity of governing land grabbing; terminology and discursive debates; and, the politics of numbers and measurement.
Complexity of Global Land Governance
- This complexity plays out in several ways.
- As a result flex crops not only make understanding the global land grab a more difficult challenge but also "fragments the political space and makes single-issue focus advocacy campaigns more difficult" (ibid.).
- Emergent global land governance may become even more complicated with the appearance of new governance fields on the horizon.
- International human rights have also gained salience in emergent global land grabbing, not least for the centrality of the right to food in the work of the CFS and in the Voluntary Guidelines.
- All this suggests potential further crowding of emergent global land governance.
Terminology and Discursive Debates
- In addition to getting a general picture of how much land has been grabbed, it is also important to ask questions about how land grabs are being framed and who is doing the framing.
- This tension is most evident in deciding what term to use to label this phenomenon.
- The word 'acquire' makes reference only to the actions of those acquiring land and evokes administrative transaction between those who seek to acquire land and those who give up land.
- This is the term preferred by the World Bank, governmental institutions, as well as by the International Land Coalition (ILC), which is a coalition of the national financial institutions (World Bank, IFAD), governmental institutions (e.g. FAO), aid donors and some NGOs (e.g. Oxfam) .
- The term 'land grabbing' politicizes and historicizes contemporary land grabs.
Counting land grabs and the politics of numbers/measurement
- The situation facing anyone engaged in the global land grabbing debate is a lack of sufficient empirical data.
- Numbers are not objective depictions of reality but implicitly involve political judgements about how phenomenon should be measured and results interpreted (see, e.g., Alonso and Starr, 1987; Brysk, 1994) .
- The authors observe such politics of numbers and measurement coursing in the policy and academic debates about land grabbing.
- For policymakers engaged in global land governance, this is a mere footnote because the Bank's expert authority (and the reverence of G8 and many G20 officials for the World Bank's data producing prowess) ensure its arguments are heard loud and clear.
- This marshalling of the evidence presents a particular policy problem that suggests land grabbing per se is not the problem but weak governance at the national level.
Conclusion
- The contemporary wave of land grabbing is a unique world historical event that reveals a nascent shift in the global political economy towards a more polycentric configuration of power and production.
- The global land grab has catalyzed emergent global land governance.
- Instead, the Voluntary Guidelines need to be contextualized as the first but not necessarily final word on global land governance.
- This is now acknowledged by the increasing presence of and serious engagement by powerful actors -states and increasingly the private sector alike.
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Citations
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Cites background from "Land Grabbing and Global Governance..."
...Land grabbing has provided an impetus and opportunity for an increasingly sophisticated body of research on relationships between states, governance and authority over land (Margulis, McKeon, and Borras 2013; Wolford et al. 2013)....
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...…by larger governance changes at the international, national and local levels, such as the ascendance of the World Trade Organization, national policies on food, agriculture and trade, and the rolling out of commercial land markets (Peluso and Lund, 2011; McMichael, 2012; Margulis et al., 2013)....
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References
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1,999 citations
"Land Grabbing and Global Governance..." refers background in this paper
...…of resources (i.e. water, subsoil minerals, organic and genetic matter, etc.) that may not necessarily be captured in a formalized mode but can affect others’ use and access to the productive resources found in or on the land (Ribot, 1998; Ribot and Peluso, 2003; see also Sikor and Lund, 2009)....
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"Land Grabbing and Global Governance..." refers background in this paper
...There are varying estimates of the quantity of lands that have changed hands during recent years, from a low of 45 million hectares (World Bank, 2010) to a high of 227 million hectares (Oxfam, 2012), although how the counting was done in these estimates is not always clear....
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"Land Grabbing and Global Governance..." refers background in this paper
...…so far examined land grabbing from the perspective of agrarian political economy (Peluso and Lund, 2011; White et al., 2012) and political ecology (Fairhead et al., 2012), as well as around the issues of food security (Robertson and Pinstrup-Anderson, 2010), food sovereignty (Rosset, 2011), labor…...
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...…and its successor regime is a fast expanding global policy regime which, under certain circumstances, can lead to enclosure and dispossession (Fairhead et al., 2012) as new schemes such as carbon markets and payment for ecosystem services are integrated into land planning, development, and…...
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