Governing Global Land Deals: The Role of the State in the Rush for Land

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.

List of Contributors vii 1 Governing Global Land Deals: The Role of the State in the Rush for Land 1 Wendy Wolford, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Ruth Hall, Ian Scoones and Ben White 2 State Involvement, Land Grabbing and Counter–Insurgency in Colombia 23 Jacobo Grajales 3 Road Mapping: Megaprojects and Land Grabs in the Northern Guatemalan Lowlands 45 Liza Grandia 4 Land Regularization in Brazil and the Global Land Grab 71 Gustavo de L.T. Oliveira 5 Negotiating Environmental Sovereignty in Costa Rica 93 Dana J. Graef 6 Building the Politics Machine: Tools for ‘Resolving’ the Global Land Grab 117 Michael B. Dwyer 7 Indirect Dispossession: Domestic Power Imbalances and Foreign Access to Land in Mozambique 141 Madeleine Fairbairn 8 Competition over Authority and Access: International Land Deals in Madagascar 163 Perrine Burnod, Mathilde Gingembre and Rivo Andrianirina Ratsialonana 9 Regimes of Dispossession: From Steel Towns to Special Economic Zones 185 Michael Levien 10 The Political Construction of Wasteland: Governmentality, Land Acquisition and Social Inequality in South India 211 Jennifer Baka 11 Chinese Land–Based Interventions in Senegal 231 Lila Buckley 12 Identity, Territory and Land Conflict in Brazil 253 LaShandra Sullivan Index 275

Wendy Wolford  is the Robert A. and Ruth E. Polson Professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University. Saturnino M. Borras, Jr . is Associate Professor of Rural Development Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, The Netherlands. Ruth Hall  is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape.  Ian Scoones  is a Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex and co–director of the ESRC STEPS Centre at Sussex and joint convener of the IDS–hosted  Future Agricultures Consortium .  Ben White  is Emeritus Professor of Rural Sociology at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, the Netherlands. The editors are co–coordinators of the Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI:  ww.iss.nl/ldpi ), an international network of scholars doing engaged research on the issue of global land grabbing.