Land grab vocabulary may skew understanding of investments

Scholars studying investments into land and natural resources increasingly acknowledge that the focus on land grabbing by foreign investors in the early years after the peak in commodity prices in 2007-8 was not always precise.

Often, the size of land transactions was greatly exaggerated, they were facilitated by the state, and they were carried out not by foreign investors but by domestic elites.

In a new special section in Geoforum, a number of scholars focus on new analytical perspectives that can help improve our understanding of contemporary investment processes. In the introduction, the editors, associate professor Lars Buur from Roskilde University and postdoc Rasmus Hundsbæk Pedersen from DIIS, emphasise that investment processes do not always lead to dispossession of the poor. These processes furthermore produce a number of other, often unintended, effects, like new forms of markets in land as well as changes in land rights and regulation.

Analyses should move beyond some of the empirical and analytical shortcomings of the current land grab literature and focus on these broader changes.

Papers in Beyond Land Grabbing in Geoforum:

• Beyond land grabbing. Old morals and new perspectives on contemporary investments, by Rasmus Hundsbæk Pedersen and Lars Buur
• From financialization to operations of capital: Historicizing and disentangling the finance–farmland-nexus, by Dr. Stefan Ouma, Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main
• The impact of agricultural investments on state capacity: A comparative analysis of Ethiopia and Ghana, by Tom Lavers, Researcher at ILO and Festus Boamah, post-doc researcher at the University of Bayreuth
• Access to land reconsidered: The land grab, polycentric governance and Tanzania’s new wave land reform, by Rasmus Hundsbæk Pedersen