In economics, land has been traditionally assumed to be a fixed production factor, both in terms of quantity supplied and mobility, as opposed to capital and labor, which are usually considered to be mobile factors, at least to some extent. Yet, in the last decade, international investors have expressed an unexpected interest in farmland and in land-related investments, with the demand for land brusquely rising at an unprecedented pace.

The recent global surge in large-scale foreign land acquisitions marks a radical transformation of the global economic and political landscape. Since land that attracts capital often becomes the site of expulsions and displacement, it also leads to new forms of migration. In this paper, I explore this connection from the perspective of a political philosopher. I argue that changes in global land governance unsettle the congruence of political community and bounded territory that we often take for granted.

The expansion of oil palm plantations in Papua province, Indonesia, involves the conversion of forests, among other land types in the landscapes, which are a source of clan members’ livelihoods. The way in which this expansion occurs makes it necessary to understand the factors associated with why companies look for frontier lands and what externalities are generated during both the land acquisition and plantation development periods.

Uganda’s oil and gas sector has transitioned from the exploration phase to the development phase in preparation for oil production (the operations phase). The extraction, processing, and distribution of oil require a great deal of infrastructure, which demands considerable acquisition of land from communities surrounding project sites. Here, we examine the social impacts of project land acquisition associated with oil production in the Albertine Graben region of Uganda.

The Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure (VGGT) call for governments to clearly define the term ‘public purpose’ to allow for judicial review of the goals of expropriations of property. However, recent research indicates that national-level legal frameworks that govern expropriation decision-making not only vary greatly from country to country but also often fail to comply with the VGGT standards on expropriation. This creates the potential for unpredictable and, in some cases, arbitrary applications of expropriation law in practice.

About 3.5 billion people live in countries rich in oil, gas or minerals. With good governance and transparent management, the revenues from extractive sector can have positive impacts leading to poverty reduction hence boosting shared prosperity , while respecting both the needs of the community and the environment. The extractive sector in Kenya contributes about one (1) per cent to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and three (3) per cent of the total export earnings.

The International Land Coalition (ILC) has commissioned this present report to analyze the illegal/irregular acquisition of land by Kenya’s elites to ascertain the types of land affected, the processes used to acquire land, and the profiles of the perpetrators, as well as to identify the victims and the impacts of land grabbing. The report is drawn largely from the Kenya Land Alliance (KLA)’s series “Unjust Enrichment: The Making of Land Grabbing Millionaires”,

Ce numéro de « Regards sur le foncier » est composé d’une revue bibliographique et des communications écrites par des jeunes chercheurs. Ces textes sont issus des journées d’études de juillet 2018 organisées par le Comité technique « Foncier & développement » dans le cadre du chantier de réflexion collective « Systèmes agraires et accès des jeunes à la terre ».

Economic globalization promotes the economic development of underdeveloped regions but also influences the ecological environments of these regions, such as natural forest degradation. For inland developing regions with underdeveloped traffic routes, are the effects on the ecological environment also as obvious?

This is a case about innovative approach of Boonrueng wetland forest conservation against land conversion for Special Economic Zone. Boonrueng wetland forest is the largest seasonal flooded forest in the Ing watershed located in the North of Thailand. It provides the high ecological functions and qualities of the tributary in the downstream Ing River, out-flowing into the Mekong River. The conversion of land for the economic regionalization in Chiang Khong district is geared up in 2015 and Boonrueng wetland forest was identified as an area for Special Economic Zone.

Concessions granted to investors in Cambodia have generated a deep sense of insecurity in rural forested areas. Villagers are not confined to a passive “everyday resistance of the poor,” as mentioned by James Scott, insofar as they frequently engage in frontal strategies for recovering land. Such has been the case in the northeastern provinces, where indigenous livelihoods are recurrently threatened by foreign and national companies. But what happens when a land conflict ends up in a stakeholder dialogue?

Since the early 2000s the Lao government has dramatically increased the number of large-scale land concessions issued for agribusinesses. While studies have documented the social and environmental impacts of land dispossession, the role of Vietnamese labour on these Vietnamese-owned rubber plantations has not previously been investigated. Taking a political ecology approach, we situate this study at the intersection between ‘land grabbing’ studies and work on ‘labour geographies’.