The establishment and development of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) are a central part of the Thai government’s strategy to expand infrastructure and attract foreign investment. These areas have been designated for development pursuant to special legal and regulatory frameworks. SEZs can play a useful role in a country’s economic development strategy. However, in many instances, their establishment results in the dilution of legal protections for human rights and the environment.

Rural women make up a quarter of the world’s population, but many face legal and social barriers that limit their ability to access, use and benefit from the land they tend and depend on for their livelihoods.

More than a decade has passed since the triple crises of food, energy and finance in the period 2007–2008. Those events turned global investor interest to agriculture and its commodities and thereafter the leasing of tens of millions of hectares of land. This article reviews and synthesizes the available evidence regarding the agricultural investments that have taken place in Ethiopia since that time. We use a systematic review approach to identify literature from the Web of Science and complement that with additional literature found via Google Scholar.

Land acquisition often involves power and displacement and can be carried out on a large scale. There are many forms of land acquisition, including for environmental and conservation purposes as well as for production activities. While green grabbing has joined land grabbing as an environmental justice issue of concern, it is not necessarily the case that all green land acquisition is large scale, done by powerful outsiders, or leads to displacement and exclusion.

Land acquisition often involves power and displacement and can be carried out on a large scale. There are many forms of land acquisition, including for environmental and conservation purposes as well as for production activities. While green grabbing has joined land grabbing as an environmental justice issue of concern, it is not necessarily the case that all green land acquisition is large scale, done by powerful outsiders, or leads to displacement and exclusion.

Discusses her new book exploring the many forces and pressures facing people and their families in Dlonguébougou;Mali;which reveal a microcosm of powerful forces playing out across Africa. Life remains highly seasonal. Land which once seemed so abundant is now scarce. The open bush of 1980 is no more. Population growth is part of the story;but so is land grabbing. Several villages were turfed off their ancestral lands in 2010 to make way for a large sugar-cane plantation run by a Chinese company. Land shortage means crop yields have fallen. Grazing has run scarce.

Labor migration and large-scale land enclosures are increasingly central to the story of agrarian change throughout the Global South. Nonetheless, there remain limited understandings of how recent explosions of mobile labor and new sources of smallholder capital shape and are shaped by ongoing land use and property transformations. This article reviews this gap in Southeast Asia – a region where labor and capital are highly mobile and where the expansion of industrial agriculture and forestry has been particularly rapid.

This paper deepens the economic analysis of the effects of land consolidation – reduction of land fragmentation. It does this in the context of rural Vietnam, studying whether land consolidation promotes or hinders the Vietnamese government's policy objectives of encouraging agricultural mechanization and stimulating the off-farm rural economy. The analysis views land consolidation as a form of technical change, making it possible to apply the rich insights developed in the economic literature on that subject.

Brazil has become an agricultural powerhouse, producing roughly 30 % of the world’s soy and 15 % of its beef by 2013 – yet historically much of that growth has come at the expense of its native ecosystems. Since 1985, pastures and croplands have replaced nearly 65 Mha of forests and savannas in the legal Amazon. A growing body of work suggests that this paradigm of horizontal expansion of agriculture over ecosystems is outdated and brings negative social and environmental outcomes.

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 paper explores the political processes that activists engaged in contesting land grabbing have triggered to connect claims across borders and to international institutions, regimes and processes. Through a review of cases of land-grab resistance that have led to project cancelation or suspension, I argue that contextual elements of the land grab and shifting geopolitics highlight the need for adaptation and refinement of models of transnational advocacy, historically structured in North–South patterns.

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?