More than a decade ago, the Land Deals Politics Initiative (LDPI) was launched as a loose network of scholars and activists concerned about the rise of land, water and green grabs across the world and the consequences for rural livelihoods and agrarian relations. A massive wave of investment in land, resulting in expropriation and displacement had emerged following the financial, food and energy crises of 2008-09. The global debate around land deals has diminished in the last several years, but important research and political questions remain. What happened to the thousands of land grabs documented by researchers, non-governmental organisations, activist groups, news media, and aid agencies? What new configurations of land, labour and capital have emerged since? How has the rise of authoritarian, state-led populism and politics re-shaped the tensions between ‘foreignisation’ and extraction? This LDPI Working Paper Series includes work in progress presented at the 2024 Global Land Grabbing Conference in Bogotá, addressing urgent challenges related to land, water, and natural resource grabbing.
001 - Global land deals: What has been done, what has changed, and what’s next? by Wendy W. Wolford, Ben White, Ian Scoones, Ruth Hall, Marc Edelman and Saturnino M. Borras Jr
002 - Spectacularization and the contemporary land rush in the Colombian Altillanura by Lorenza Arango
003 - Rushing for Land in the Context of Climate Change: Seven theses about why climate justice requires radical changes in land governance by Annelies Zoomers and Kei Otsuki
004- Land Title Frauds as Corporate Land-grabbing Methods: Evidence from Brazil by Markus Kröger and Adriana Margutti
005 - Land, Party/State-led Development and Protest in Ethiopia by Frew Yirgalem Mane
006 - Eco-Agrarian Question: Land and green grabbing in the Brazilian agricultural frontier by Sérgio Sauer
007 - Spectacular Dispossession: Land Grabbing, Far-Right Urbanism and the Economy of Appearances in El Salvador’s “Bitcoin City” by Julio Gutiérrez
008 - Land Pawning as Land Grabbing: A Focus on Rural Malawi by Loveness Msofi and Masautso Chimombo
009 - Dispossession and political struggles in ‘failed’ land investments by Doi Ra
010 - Digital green grabs in the name of climate in Brazil’s Matopiba frontier by Diana Aguiar and Mauricio Correia
011 - Whose salt? Unravelling the role of state policy regimes in resource grabbing in Ghana by Faustina Obeng Adomaa, Gertrude Dzifa Torvikey, and Adwoa Yeboah Gyapong
012 - Territory grabbing and the undermining of Palestinian food sovereignty by Salena Tramel
013 - REDD+ and the Climate rent: The reorganization of value relations through forest conservation in Colombia by Sergio Carvajal
014 - Unpacking incremental land grabbing: Anti-coal struggles and the political economy of coal extraction in India by Amod Shah
015 - Navigating the Murky Waters of Resource Exploitation: A Global Review of Marine Grabbing and Freshwater Grabbing by Andreas Neef
016 - Horizontalities and verticalities in Matopiba (Brazil): reactions from below to global corporate agribusiness land grabbing by Bruno Rezende Spadotto
017 - Fostering Accountability: Acknowledging Transnational Challenges in Land Investments for Informed Action by Jeremy Bourgoin, Roberto Interdonato, Marie Gradeler, Ward Anseeuw
018 - The dynamics of public land privatization in urban DRC: A case study of Bukavu in eastern DRC by Benjamin Muhoza Kanze
019 - Double-Binds in Land Grab Contexts: The Case of Peasant Miners in Napo, Ecuador by Angus Lyall & Gabriela Ruales
020 - Who acquires land and how does it matter? Unveiling the dynamics of domestic land acquisition by Shivalika Madgulkar & Jampel Dell’Angelo
021 - Acaparamiento y Restitución de Tierras: Lecciones de los procesos de restitución en los Montes de María-Colombia by Julián Andrés Rivera Delgado and Sergio Latorre Restrepo
022 - The Carbon Rush: Expropriation of Emission Rights and Socio-Environmental (In)Justice by Natacha Bruna
023 - Oil extraction and indirect land grabbing: Responsibility and resistance in Southern sacrifice zones by Anja Nygren & Angela Viviana Rabelo Avalos
024 - Trees devouring sheep: Land grabbing investment funds and the ‘new enclosures’ of Welsh farmland by Alex Heffron
025 - Power and Financialization: Soft Power and the Rise of Corporate Conservation in an Appalachian Valley by Gabe Schwartzman and John Gaventa
026 - Traveling Rivers, Mapping Movements: The politics of counter-mapping to bridge grassroots struggles against river grabbing by Rutgerd Boelens et. al.
027 - The older land grabs: ‘invisible’ and non-operational land deals within the State territorialization and frontier production in the Argentinian Chaco by Juan Diego Ayala
028 - Hydrological and institutional mechanisms of water grabbing by Paolo D’Odorico, Jampel Dell’Angelo, Maria Cristina Rulli
029 - State-backed land dispossession: The role of property rights violations and restrictions in capitalist market economies by Frances Thomson
030 - Dispossession, extractive capitalism and political reactions from below in West Papua by Rassela Malinda
031 - Differentiated impacts of green grabbing in social reproduction: the case of la Sierra de la Macarena National Park by Sammy Andrea Sánchez Garavito
032 - Land Grabbing through Unlivability: Necroscapes and Slow Violence in the Expansion of Conservation Regimes in Tanzania by Felix Mantz
033 - Land and water rush in the South of Minas Gerais’ corporate coffee production by Estevan Coca
034 - Failed land deals and the invisibilization of land grabbing in Mozambique by Natacha Bruna, Saturnino M. Borras Jr. and Yunan Xu
035 - Mangroves in the Colombian Caribbean: A story of the inclusion of water and land ecosystems in biodiversity and climate change public policies by Catalina Quiroga
036 - Reading the Archive Against the Grain: Peasant Women and Children in the Struggle for Land and Livelihoods in the Colombian Caribbean during the 1960s by Margarita Martínez-Osorio
037 - Land Deals Outside the Spotlight and the Land Rush in Ethiopia by Moges Belay
038 - From little ants to monster-slayers: metaphors used by corporations and transnational activist networks in land and climate conflicts by Daniela P. G. Calmon
039 - Dependency, Imperialism, and the Super-Exploitation of Labour-Power and Nature in the Global South by Mark Tilzey
040 - Land as a “means to an end”? Grain farmers, land imaginaries and assetization in Alberta, Canada by Katherine Aske
041 - Land Grabbing and its Implications for Pastoral Nomads’ Lands and Livelihoods. Blue Nile State, Sudan (1970-2023) by Ali-Ibrahim Mustafa Mohammed
042 - Hijacking land tenure: how individual corrupt conduct and policy capture are enabling land grabs in Brazil by Joachim S. Stassart, Flávia M. de A. Collaço, Dário Cardoso Jr., Richard Torsiano, & Renato Morgado
043 - Death of agrarian societies by a thousand cuts: ‘Pin prick’ land grabs and the land rush by Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Lorenza Arango, Moges Belay, Jennifer C. Franco, Sai Sam Kham, Tsegaye Moreda, Doi Ra, Itayosara Rojas, Chunyu Wang, Jingzhong Ye & Yunan Xu
044 - ‘Capital grabs back’: Agrarian counter-reform dynamics in the global South and North by Enrique Castañón Ballivián, George Tonderai Mudimu, Mnqobi Ngubane & Melanie Sommerville
045 - Oil Palm, Affects, Dreams: Everyday Forms of Dispossession in Colombia by Andrés Caicedo & Ingrid Díaz Moreno
046 - Unpaid Women’s Labor Driving Value Chain Disintegration in the Colombian Palm Oil Industry by Angela Serrano Zapata & M. Sofía Luna-Siachoque
047 - Extracting but not producing value: Land development through everyday speculation of rent in Indonesia’s new capital city by Bosman Batubara, Kei Otsuki, Femke van Noorloos, & Michelle Kooy
049 - Peasant resistances value for global sustainability: three failed coastal grabs of metal mining projects in West Africa by Alessandra Manzini, Lamine Sadio, Luc Descroix
050 - Contract Farming and Environmental Precarity in the Mekong Delta by Thuy Ho and Annie Shattuck
051 - Variations of Extra-Economic Coercion in the Global Land Rush: The Case of Oil Palm Expansion in the Orinoco-Amazon Corridor by Itayosara Rojas Herrera
052 - Crisis, Ecological Conflicts, and the River Fix by J. Sebastian Reyes-Bejarano
053 - Coca entanglements: cocalero women between gendered resistance and everyday dispossession by Chiara Chiavaroli and Irene Vélez-Torres
054 - Producing and sharing data on large-scale land acquisitions: challenges and lessons learned from land observatories by Quentin Grislain, Perrine Burnod, Jeremy Bourgoin, and Ward Anseeuw
055 - Scrutinizing the digitalization of food and agricultural systems: The EU’s agrarian project and its local and offshore impacts by Alistair Fraser
056 - From ‘Silent Privatization’' to Policy-Supported (Re)concentration: Historicizing the Dynamics of Land Concentration in Mozambique by Clemente Ntauazi and Boaventura Monjane
057 - Ecological imperialism and struggles over the state: historical trajectories behind contemporary authoritarianism in Burma/Myanmar by Yukari Sekine
058 - Water Commons Grabbing: a heuristic framework by Jampel Dell’Angelo, Paolo D’Odorico, and Maria Cristina Rulli
059 - El rol de la Sociedad de Activos Especiales en las políticas de Reforma Agraria en Colombia by Jaime Osorno
060 - Urbanization and Peri-Urban land grabbing in Karachi by Hammal Muhammad Aslam and Haroon Ishaque
061 - After the banana enclave: plantation legacies and the chemicalization of agriculture in Costa Rica by Soledad Castro-Vargas & Marion Werner