In fishing communities the contentious acquisition of land close to water bodies is especially relevant. Water grabbing has serious implications for basic human rights including the right to water, food, health, livelihood, and self-determination. Land grabbing is driven by the desire to control and use water and fisheries resources. Globally, Uganda is among the 25 countries most affected by water grabbing.

As part of a collaborative project to strengthen the capacity of grassroots communities in Mali, Nigeria, Uganda and South Africa, this practical guide focuses on accountability and accountability politics in the global rush to grab land, water and other natural resources. Through action research, threatened communities can determine causes, conditions, and consequences that will inform collective action and advocacy, in particular by using the CFS/FAO Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (Tenure Guidelines or TGs).

textabstractAdaptation and security framings have gained traction not only to explain the causal chains and impacts of environmental change and/or migration, but also to justify land intensive interventions to address them. Despite progress in the understanding of the complex links between environmental change and migration, academic and policy analyses have paid scarce attention to the ways in which environmental and migration narratives are (re)shaping access to fundamental natural resources and changing migration dynamics in the process.

textabstractThis paper seeks to unravel the political economy of large-scale land acquisitions in
post-Soviet Russia. Russia falls neither in the normal category of ‘investor’ countries,
nor in the category of ‘target’ countries. Russia has large ‘land reserves’, since in the
1990s much fertile land was abandoned. We analyse how particular Russia is with
regards to the common argument in favour of land acquisitions, namely that land is
available, unused or even unpopulated. With rapid economic growth, capital of

textabstractChina tends to be a dominant figure in the literature on global land grabbing. It is either cast as a major land grabber in distant places such as Africa, or as a key player in crop booms elsewhere because it provides for massive market demand, such as for soya from South America. These are all important issues and are well covered in the literature. However, the crop booms inside China that involve transnational capital and investors – and have provoked conflict around land politics – have been overlooked.

textabstractGlobal climate change policy enforcement has become the new driving force of resource
grabbing in the context of the “scramble of resources” in Africa. Nevertheless, the environmental crisis
should not be seen as an isolated phenomenon amid contemporary capitalism. On the contrary, a very
distinct feature of the current wave of land grabs is the convergence of multiple crises, including food,
energy/fuel, environmental, and financial. The Southern Mozambique District, Massingir, is an area

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textabstractMainstream adherence to land titling as a strategy to address rural poverty has gained even more sway against the backdrop of the contemporary phenomenon of large-scale farmland acquisitions, known to some as “global land grabbing”. The orthodox narrative, embraced in toto by organisations such as the World Bank, is that formal property rights mitigate the risks of these land acquisitions and allow the poor to access the benefits of these acquisitions.

textabstractRural politics in the time of global land grabs and neoliberal agricultural development have received much international attention. However, the processes at work in the post-socialist countryside (such as in Russia and Ukraine) are rarely addressed in the critical agrarian studies debates. The prefix ‘post-’ in post-socialist and post-Soviet studies is often associated with lagging behind. This doctoral study demonstrates that the analysis of rural politics in these settings can generate new insights about contemporary changes in the agrarian world.

markdownabstractThis article analyses the key pillars of the neoliberal policies as well as their impact on agrarian change on a world scale. Since the beginning of the 1980s various countries started to dismantle the developmentalist and protectionist state by intensifying their links with the world economy. The „imperative of the market‟ became the principal force of agrarian change and the state. The neoliberals argued that the developmentalist policies had an „urban bias‟ favouring industry and plundering agriculture.

Of all the rural social movements in the world, those in post-socialist Russia have been considered to be among the weakest. Nevertheless, triggered by the neo-liberal reforms in the countryside, state attention to agriculture and rising land conflicts, new social movement organisations with a strong political orientation are emerging in Russia today. This sudden burst of civil activity, however, raises questions as to how genuine and independent the emerging organisations are.

In the last two decades, the industrial tree plantation (ITP) sector has expanded rapidly in southern China, causing important changes in land-use and land control. It involves both domestic and transnational corporations, and has provoked widespread conflict and political contestations.