Gender And The Global Land Grab

Since the year 2000, millions of hectares of land in the Global South have been acquired by foreign investors for large-scale agricultural projects, displacing and disrupting rural communities. Women are especially disadvantaged by the global land grab: they are less likely to inherit, control, or make decisions over land, but often need land to support themselves, their families, and their communities. While international organizations have developed global guidelines to improve land governance, tensions still run high as the current policies fall short. Gender and the Global Land Grab introduces a feminist conceptual framework to analyze land governance policy around the world. Andrea Collins shows how gender norms, biases, and expectations shape land politics at different levels of governance. Drawing on examples from sub-Saharan Africa and with an in-depth case study of land politics in Tanzania, the book assesses guidelines developed by institutions such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Bank to highlight essential considerations for developing and implementing gender-sensitive policy. Illustrating how gender shapes resource policy across all levels of political activity, Gender and the Global Land Grab provides valuable tools for transforming global policymaking.

The last two years have seen a huge amount of academic, policy-making and media interest in the increasingly contentious issue of land grabbing - the large-scale acquisition of land in the global South. It is a phenomenon against which locals seem defenceless, and one about which multilateral organizations, such as the World Bank, as well as civil-society organizations and action NGOs have become increasingly vocal. This in-depth and empirically diverse volume - taking in case studies from across Africa, Asia and Latin America - takes a step back from the hype to explore a number of key questions: Does the 'global land grab' actually exist? If so, what is new about it? And what, beyond the immediately visible dynamics and practices, are the real problems? A comprehensive and much-needed intervention on one of the most hotly contested but little-understood issues facing countries of the South today.

This book explores the gendered dimensions of recent land governance transformations across the globe in the wake of unprecedented pressures on land and natural resources. These complex contemporary forces are reconfiguring livelihoods and impacting women’s positions, their tenure security and well-being, and that of their families. Bringing together fourteen empirical community case studies from around the world, the book examines governance transformations of land and land-based resources resulting from four major processes of tenure change: commercial land based investments, the formalization of customary tenure, the privatization of communal lands, and post-conflict resettlement and redistribution reforms. Each contribution carefully analyses the gendered dimensions of these transformations, exploring both the gender impact of the land tenure reforms and the social and political economy within which these reforms materialize. The cases provide important insights for decision makers to better promote and design an effective gender lens into land tenure reforms and natural resource management policies. This book will be of great interest to researchers engaging with land and natural resource management issues from a wide variety of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, development studies, and political science, as well as policy makers, practitioners, and activists concerned with environment, development, and social equity.

This collection of essays in Governing Global Land Deals provides new empirical and theoretical analyses of the relationships between global land grabs and processes of government and governance. Reframes debates on global land grabs by focusing on the relationship between large-scale land deals and processes of governance Offers new theoretical insights into the different forms and effects of global land acquisitions Illuminates both the micro-processes of transaction and expropriation, as well as the broader structural forces at play in global land deals Provides new empirical data on the different actors involved in contemporary land deals occurring across the globe and focuses on the specific institutional, political, and economic contexts in which they are acting

The essays in Global Land Grabs take the debate over land grabbing to a new stage, scrutinizing claims of earlier research, probing historical antecedents of today's land grabbing, examining large-scale land acquisitions in light of international human rights and investment law, and considering anew longstanding questions in agrarian political economy about forms of dispossession and accumulation and grassroots resistance. This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

"Land grabs are a global phenomenon of our times, driven by the ever increasing demands of both global corporations and the governments with which they are allied. But as this powerful and timely book demonstrates, ordinary citizens, small farmers and ordinary citizens around the world are standing up to defend their own with passion and ingenuity, and they are recording successes that are both extraordinary and inspiring." —Oliver Tickell, Editor, The Ecologist. Climate change ravages the earth, while wealthy elites try to grab as much of the world’s diminishing resources as possible. As Vandana Shiva writes, land is life. But land, and the struggle to possess it, is also power—colonial and corporate power, to be sure, but also the power of the dispossessed to rise up and call for an end to the global land grab. Grabbing Back maps this struggle, bringing together analyses that uncover the politics of cultivation and control. In this unprecedented collection, on-the-ground activists join forces with critically acclaimed scholars to document the commodification and consumption of space, from foreclosed homes to annihilated rainforests, from ecotourism in Sri Lanka to the tar sands of Montana, and to outline the strategies and tactics that might the destruction. With contributions by Vandana Shiva, Noam Chomsky, Max Rameau, Grace Lee Boggs, Michael Hardt, Ahjamu Umi, Ben Dangl, and many others. More Praise for Grabbing Back: “Part of the reason that knowledge about the current global land grab is so uncertain is the paucity of perspectives and analysis in defining the problem. This book fills the gap admirably.” —Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved "The acquisition, control, and exploitation of land, as well as the simultaneous dispossession of land-based and peasant communities, is central to the processes of both colonialism and capitalism. As Fanon reminds us, egalitarian governance and stewardship of land is fundamental to the struggle for liberation and self-determination for all oppressed peoples. This makes Grabbing Back a necessary study for anticapitalist and anticolonial movements." —Harsha Walia, author of Undoing Border Imperialism "Grab back this sparkling mosaic of essays as a treasure of our new-old knowledge commons. Together these pieces replace dichotomies with dialectics, making explicit the inseparability of land and collective life. Together they restore the vital concept of social ecology in resistance to relentless and increasingly apocalyptic capitalism, with emphasis on its second contradiction: its impossibility on a finite resource base." —Maia Ramnath, author of Decolonizing Anarchism “As the forces of thanatos leave no stone unturned in their quest to dominate the entire planet, this anthology provides a much needed antidote. Weaving together accounts from around the world, the authors advocate building grassroots movements aimed at subverting capital’s incessant assault on our lives and land.”—George Katsiaficas, author of Asia’s Unknown Uprisings “Never perhaps has the land question been so crucial for anti-capitalist movements, as we are witnessing a global process of enclosure that privatizes lands, waters, forests, displacing millions from their homes, and placing monetary gates to what we rightly considered our commonwealth. It is essential then that we understand what motivates this drive and its effects in all their social and spatial dimensions. Grabbing Back takes us through this process, identifying the “reasons” and actors behind this global land-grab and, most important, introducing us to the struggles that people are making across the world to resist being evicted from their lands and to reclaim the earth. ” —George Caffentzis, Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa

When the 2007-2008 food and financial crises triggered a global wave of land grabbing, scholars, activists and policy practitioners assumed that this would be met with massive peasant resistance. As empirical evidence accumulated, however, it became clear that political reactions ‘from below’ to land grabbing were quite varied and complex. Violent resistance, outright expulsions, everyday ‘weapons of the weak’ and demands for better terms of incorporation into land deals were among the outcomes that emerged. Readers of this collection will encounter a multinational group of scholars who use the tools of social movements theory and critical agrarian studies to examine cases from Argentina, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Uganda, Mali, Ukraine, India, and Laos, as well as the Rio +20 Sustainable Development Conference. Initiatives ‘from below’ in response to land deals have involved local and transnational alliances and the use of legal and extra-legal methods, and have brought victories and defeats. This book was first published as a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies.