This article studies both 'operational' and 'non-operational' land deals, arguing that they are co-constitutive.
Authored by Jun Borras, Jennifer Franco, Tsegaye Moredo, Yunan Xu, Natacha Bruna and Binyam Afewerk Demena, this article in Land Use Policy investigates the value of large-scale land acquisitions.
The land rush has remained, and is likely to remain, a significant global phenomenon despite waning international media attention. The scope of the phenomenon is likely to be wider than previously thought.
Quantifying the extent of land deals in order to study the social phenomenon spotlights the relevance of two distinct but dialectically linked ‘scopes’, namely, the scope of land deals in terms of the precise geographic physical land area of Operational land deals, and the scope of land deals in terms of the larger extent of lands implicated in land deal-making, of which only a part ends up as operational land deals. The latter category is necessarily bigger than the former, and its logic results in the production of Non-operational land deals.
Studies have been overwhelmingly about Operational land deals, inadvertently downplaying the relevance of Non-operational land deals. The challenge is to study both Operational and Non-operational land deals because they are co-constitutive.
'The value of so-called "failed" large-scale land acquisitions', Land Use Policy 2022
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About the Commodity & land rushes and regimes project
Guided by a multi-disciplinary theoretical framework and grounded in empirical work, the project engages in practical policy questions aimed at probing the potential for socially just and ecologically sustainable reforms.
It focuses on three countries which have been global hotspots of commodity and land rushes: Ethiopia, Myanmar and Colombia.
