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LAND GRABBING AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES
Matias E. Margulis*
Division of History and Politics
University of Stirling
Email: m.e.margulis@stir.ac.uk
Nora McKeon
Independent Researcher, Rome, Italy
Saturnino M. Borras, Jr.
International Institute of Social Studies
Abstract
Land grabbing has emerged as a significant issue in contemporary global governance that cuts across the
fields of development, investment, food security, among others. Whereas land grabbing per se is not a
new phenomenon, having historical precedents in the eras of imperialism, the character, scale, pace,
orientation and key drivers of the recent wave of land grabs is a distinct historical phenomenon closely
tied to major shifts in power and production in the global political economy. Land grabbing is facilitated
by ever greater flows of capital, goods, and ideas across borders, and these flows occur through axes of
power that are far more polycentric than the North-South imperialist tradition. In this introduction we
argue that land grabbing speaks to many of the core questions of globalization studies. However, we note
scholars of globalization have yet to deeply engage with this new field. We situate land grabbing in an
era of advanced capitalism, multiple global crises and the role of new configurations of power and
resistance in global governance institutions. The essays in this collection contribute to identifying land
grabbing as an important and urgent topic for theoretical and empirical investigations to deepen our
understanding of contemporary globalization and governance.
Keywords: land grabbing, large-scale land acquisitions, globalization, global governance, polycentrism
*This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Globalizations 10(1): 1-23 (2013), available
at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2013.764151
Doi: 10.1080/14747731.2013.764151
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Introduction
Over the last few years, land grabbing has become a well-established phenomenon. There are varying
estimates of the quantity of lands that have changed hands during recent years, from a low 45 million
hectares (World Bank, 2010) to a high 227 million hectares (Oxfam, 2012), although how the counting
was done in these estimates is not always clear. This global land rush is characterized by transnational
and domestic corporate investors, governments and local elites taking control over large quantities of
land (and its minerals and water) to produce food, feed, biofuel and other industrial commodities for the
international or domestic markets. Such land deals are very often associated with very low levels of
transparency, consultation and respect for the rights of local communities living off the land (Borras and
Franco, 2010; Cotula, 2012; Zoomers, 2010). In response to concerns over the real and massive
experiences of dispossession, violence and social exclusion, land grabbing has been elevated to an issue
of world political significance around which local and transnational resistance has swelled and for which
new global governance instruments are being created. The importance of land grabbing as a topic in
global governance is well established. This salience is confirmed by events in the real world: land
grabbing is on the agenda of the Group of Eight (G-8)/Group of Twenty (G-20); it is at the core of the
World Bank’s new global development agenda; several new global governance instruments have been
negotiated to address land grabbing; global civil society and transnational social movements are
mobilizing around this phenomenon; and investors and corporations are intensifying their acquisitions
and global competition for land.
The idea of a land grab has a long intellectual history dating back to the writings of Karl Marx. The
study of land and agrarian change has been integral to our understanding of the development of
capitalism and the contemporary world order (Peluso and Lund, 2011; Arighi and Karides, 2012). We
recognize that land grabs today are deeply shaped by past practices and historical legacies and exhibit
continuities from the past but also diverge in significant ways, and are riddled with contradictions and
tensions. Our emphasis here, however, is on the specific contemporary context that is giving rise to land
grabbing on a global scale. There is a burgeoning academic literature that has so far examined land
grabbing from the perspective of agrarian political economy (White et al., 2012, Peluso and Lund, 2011)
and political ecology (Fairhead, Leach & Scoones, 2012), as well as around the issues of food security
(Robertson & Pinstrup-Anderson, 2010), food sovereignty (Rosset, 2011), labour (Li, 2011), human
rights (De Schutter, 2011), gender relations (Chu, 2011; Berhman, Meinzen-Dick and Quisumbing,
2012; Julia and White 2012), land use change (Friis & Reenberg, 2010), the role of the state (Wolford et
al., 2013), water grabbing (Mehta et al., 2012, Allen et al., 2012), and neoliberalism (Araghi and
Karides, 2012).
With some exceptions scholars of globalization in general have been absent from the debate on this
emerging issue. This is unfortunate because land grabbing is emblematic of contemporary globalization
and speaks to many of the big questions that concern scholars of globalization. Land grabbing is
facilitated by ever more extensive and rapid flows of capital, goods, and ideas across borders and these
flows occur through axes of power that are far more polycentric than the North-South imperialist
tradition. In addition, land grabbing is occurring in the context of late capitalism and a global multiple
food-energy-climate-finance crises in which we can see the changing character of global production and
consumption, including an integrated global food-energy complex. Land grabbing is a global-scale
phenomenon that is occurring in all regions and parts of the world, and not only in Africa as is assumed
to be the case (see Visser and Spoor, 2011, on post-Soviet Eurasia; Borras et al., 2013), on Latin
America; Borras and Franco, 2011 on Southeast Asia). Whereas land grabbing per se is not a new
phenomenon, having historical precedents in the eras of colonialism and imperialism (Alden-Wily 2012),
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the drivers, scale, and pace of the recent wave of land grabs are distinct from previous eras. As Saskia
Sassen, explains (2013, this volume), unlike in the eras of colonialism and imperialism the current wave
of land grabs occurs in a world of sovereign states exercising territorial control at least formally.
Transborder flows of capital, property rights, and agricultural production go through, rather than bypass,
multiple layers of formal governance mechanisms ranging from investment and trade treaties to financial
markets. Therefore, contemporary global land grabbing displays properties specific to our era of
advanced economic globalization. Land grabbing is an important site of new transnational political
struggles for authority and control over resources and governance. These struggles go beyond who
should control the land, and are contests largely about what should be grown on it, how, by whom, for
what markets, hence the future of global agriculture. Thus the stakes being fought over in the struggles
for global land grab are massive and are likely to reshape the future course of globalization, partly by
producing openings and/or closing off avenues for global policies and practices that provide those that
live off the land with autonomy, including a degree of protection from global economic forces, to decide
future life courses.
In this introductory essay, we raise the point of the need for globalization studies to address more
systematically the issue of global land grabbing. As suggested above, the global land grab reveals
strongly many aspects of economic globalization. In the same instance, contemporary globalization
cannot be fully understood without a deeper understanding of land grabbing. 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. These global aspects have remained largely under-studied and under-theorized but are
precisely the terrain for inquiry where globalization scholars are most strongly situated to engage with
questions concerning territory, power, authority, and resistance.
This collection is a preliminary effort seeking to bring a lens from globalizations studies to land
grabbing. Our purpose is twofold. One is to offer initial analyses of land grabbing from a globalization
perspective in order to bring land grabbing to the attention of scholars interested in globalization and
transnational governance. Our hunch is that given that land grabbing cuts across so many core areas of
globalization research – territorialisation, financialization, trade, human rights, crises, and so on –
readers will quickly start to see the links between their work and the ideas presented here and in the
process we hope to stimulate new questions and lines of investigation in the field. A second purpose is to
foster greater dialogue between scholars of globalization with the burgeoning literature on land grabbing
spearheaded by the agrarian political economy and political ecology scholars. These latter fields of
study, which now provide an extensive set of case studies of land grabbing, would be enriched by the
global-scale theoretical contributions of globalization and transnational governance studies. This can
lead to more robust analysis of global-local interactions behind land grabbing. One starting point for
such cross-fertilization is to consider how local land struggles are likely to be altered by changes in the
global policy environment, such as the entrance of foreign investors that is permitted by the burden of
debt regime affecting most developing countries – as Sassen (2013, this volume) explains, but also by
global governance instruments aimed at defending the rights of those who live off the land (2013
McKeon, 2013, this volume; Kunnemann and Monsalve Suárez, 2013, this volume). Studies of
globalization and governance also stand to benefit from a deeper engagement with agrarian political
economy and political ecology analysis of land grabbing because the latter have produced deep
knowledge of the social, economic and political effects of the multiple food-energy-climate-finance
crises on the ground. 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. It is not our point that one crisis (i.e., financial, food or climatic) is more important
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than another one. Instead our point is that knowledge of globalization in the 21
st
century is most likely to
be enhanced only when we start from the standpoint that these crises are mutually affected world
historical events.
This collection is organized around the transnational contestation of land grabbing and its governance.
This is because the global/transnational scales are sites of new and significant governance activity. This
volume offers a perspective that examines land grabbing and its governance as embedded within a larger
international political economy context. The collection offers critical perspective in the sense of that
most authors in this collection are concerned by land grabbing and its negative social and ecological
consequences. Hence, this collection is sympathetic to a global social justice agenda. It is in this context
that we also purposely include knowledge and experiences from outside the academy: several of the
essays in this volume are written by activists situated in global civil society that have participated in the
negotiation and resistance politics of emergent global land governance. This coming together of
academic and activist researchers enriches this collection immensely, and is important for co-production
and -mobilization of knowledge.
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. Land grabbing has
been taken up in the work of the United Nations (UN) system and Bretton Woods institutions - but most
actively at the UN Food and Agriculture Organizations (FAO), the Committee on World Food Security
(CFS) and the World Bank, at the G8 and G20 summits, at the European Commission (i.e., in discussion
about the indirect effects of its biofuel mandate), and at African Union’s work on a regional land policy
framework. The well known, flagship global rule-making projects are the recently negotiated UN
Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (herein
‘Voluntary Guidelines’, see Seufert, 2013, this volume) and the ongoing transnational negations to
develop rules for responsible agricultural investment (see Stephens, 2013, this volume). Many other
projects have been spawned by the food crisis that impact on global governance and are directly related
to land grabbing, such as the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (a new multi-donor trust
fund that encourages public and private investment in agriculture), the G8’s so-called New Alliance for
Food Security and Nutrition, a development assistance program now spearheaded by the Obama
administration, and the World Economic Forum’s “Grow Africa” initiative. All of these projects share
the objective of promoting large-scale private-sector led investments in developing country agriculture
and highlighting the weight of investments relative to that of policies. 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.
‘Global governance’ is a term that is widely used to refer to the modern practice of governing
transborder problems and to the institutions, rules, actors, and ideologies that govern the global political
economy (we include here the social and biophysical). Global governance as an academic concept and
field emerged in the 1990s in response to new global-scale problems such as HIV/AIDs, climate change
and international migration that came to be understood as beyond the capacity of any single nation-states
to manage on their own (Roseneau, 1995). The field of global governance was also deeply influenced by
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shifting power at the global level and its implication for international cooperation; this included at first
the fall of Soviet Union and what this meant for US unipolarity and multilateralism and, more recently,
the focus on emerging countries as new players in multilateralism. Today the term global governance is
widely used by academics and the general public in in a variety of always and meanings, including
reference to the ‘practices of governance without government’ (Roseneau and Czempiel, 1992); a
‘normative goal’ (Wiess, 2000); a ‘discourse’ (Brand, 2006); the inclusion of actors other than nation
states (McKeon, 2009) and the ‘institutionalization of the neoliberal globalization project’ (Cox, 1993).
Like other scholars, we recognize the complexity and contradictions bound up with this term/concept
and empirical reality (see Wilkinson and Hughes, 2002; Kahler and Lake, 2003). In our view, a critical
approach to global governance is required to make sense of the new global rule-making projects around
land grabbing. This includes identifying the actors, interests and ideologies driving particular governance
initiatives but also the international political economy context in which such initiatives arise.
Land and Territoriality
Land at first glance does not easily fit the type of singular issue-areas commonly associated with
contemporary global governance. Unlike other fields of global governance such as climate change,
HIV/AIDs, and terrorism that are framed as global-scale problems that are broadly recognizable as such
by the global imagination – climate change with (negative) ecological change, HIV/AIDs with high
mortality rates, terrorism with unpredictable violence – land does not slot easily into existing socially
constructed categories of a global-scale “problem”. 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. As such, in the current era land and its control have tended to be equated with state
practices. This conception of land as integral to sovereign territory and authority is affirmed by most
international practices, such as international legal recognition of state borders and territorial authority
(i.e., the spatial demarcation of where a state’s land and water borders begin and end). In the post-
colonial era, land is regarded as a thing belonging to a national state. In general, land has not figured as a
significant issue-area of global governance with the exceptions of instances of where land is invaded by
an occupying force. Land as sovereign territory is a key international norm and framework critical to
understanding the politics of global land governance. 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.
Rolf Kunnemann and Sofía Monsalve Suárez (2013, this volume) note that land tenure governance
regimes in the Global South mirror their colonial antecedents in that they provide the state with far
reaching control over the land. They contend that while contemporary land grabbing may be driven by
global economic actors, the importance of national legal frameworks should not be overlooked because
these have actually made it easier for states to facilitate land grabbing. Closely related to the argument
made by Kunnemann and Monsalve Suárez, Borras, Franco and Wang (2013, this volume) explain that
states actively facilitate land grabs through a combination of the following tasks that only national
governments have absolute authority to perform, namely, (i) ‘invention/justification’ of the need for
large-scale land investments, (ii) ‘definition, reclassification and quantification’ of what is ‘marginal,
under-utilized and empty’ lands; (iii) ‘identification’ of these particular types of land; (iv)
‘acquisition/appropriation’ of these lands, and (v) ‘re-allocation/disposition’ of these lands to investors.
Much of what is being grabbed is within the legal-administrative-military control of national states.
The global land grab raises deeper questions about territoriality in the era of advanced economic
globalization. In her contribution to this collection, Saskia Sassen (2013, this volume) explains that the
global land grab suggests a larger structural transformation at play that is “ producing massive structural
holes in the tissue of national sovereign territory”. For Sassen, the global land grab reveals an “active
making of an increasingly large number of partial, often highly specialized, cross-border spaces and