Does Commons Grabbing Lead to Resilience Grabbing? The Anti-Politics Machine of Neo-Liberal Development and Local Responses
Does Commons Grabbing Lead to Resilience Grabbing? The Anti-Politics Machine of Neo-Liberal Development and Local Responses

Author: Tobias Haller

Publisher: MDPI

Published: 2021-01-06

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 3039438395

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This Special Issue contributes to the debate on land grabbing as commons grabbing with a special focus on how the development of state institutions (formal laws and regulations for agrarian development and compensations) and voluntary corporate social responsibility (CRS) initiatives have enabled the grabbing process. It also looks at how these institutions and CSR programs are used as development strategies of states and companies to legitimate their investments. This Special Issue includes case studies from Kenya, Morocco, Tanzania, Cambodia, Bolivia and Ecuador analysing how these strategies are embedded into neo-liberal ideologies of economic development. We propose looking at James Ferguson’s notion of the Anti-Politics Machine (1990) that served to uncover the hidden political basis of state-driven development strategies. We think it is of interest to test the approach for analysing development discourses and CSR-policies in agrarian investments. We argue based on a New Institutional Political Ecology (NIPE) approach that these legitimize the institutional change from common to state and private property of land and land related common pool resources which is the basis of commons grabbing that also grabbed the capacity for resilience of local people.

Routledge Handbook of Global Land and Resource Grabbing
Routledge Handbook of Global Land and Resource Grabbing

Author: Andreas Neef

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-06-12

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 1000902374

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This handbook provides a cutting-edge, comprehensive overview of global land and resource grabbing. Global land and resource grabbing has become an increasingly prominent topic in academic circles, among development practitioners, human rights advocates, and in policy arenas. The Routledge Handbook of Global Land and Resource Grabbing sustains this intellectual momentum by advancing methodological, theoretical and empirical insights. It presents and discusses resource grabbing research in a holistic manner by addressing how the rush for land and other natural resources, including water, forests and minerals, is intertwined with agriculture, mining, tourism, energy, biodiversity conservation, climate change, carbon markets, and conflict. The handbook is truly global and interdisciplinary, with case studies from the Global South and Global North, and chapter contributions from practitioners, activists and academics, with emerging and Indigenous authors featuring strongly across the chapters. The handbook will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in land and resource grabbing, agrarian studies, development studies, critical human geography, global studies and natural resource governance. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Disenchanted Modernities
Disenchanted Modernities

Author: Tobias Haller

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2023-04

Total Pages: 494

ISBN-13: 3643803788

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Mega-Infrastructure Projects (MIPs) represent a central element of globalized development. MIPs like the Chinese driven `Belt and Road Initiative' (BRI) include large-scale agrarian, road, rail, port and energy networks. They are complex ventures involving international capital and multiple stakeholders. Disenchanted Modernities presents 16 case studies showing that the promise of a sustainable modern development by MIPs leave many local users disenchanted: They don't profit form the MIPs but lose access to their resources often held in common. The book describes the strategies of states and companies as well as local responses to MIPs in Asia, Africa, Americas and Europe.

Drylands Facing Change
Drylands Facing Change

Author: Angela Kronenburg García

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-13

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1000802566

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This edited volume examines the changes that arise from the entanglement of global interests and narratives with the local struggles that have always existed in the drylands of Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia/Inner Asia. Changes in drylands are happening in an overwhelming manner. Climate change, growing political instability, and increasing enclosures of large expanses of often common land are some of the changes with far-reaching consequences for those who make their living in the drylands. At the same time, powerful narratives about the drylands as ‘wastelands’ and their ‘backward’ inhabitants continue to hold sway, legitimizing interventions for development, security, and conservation, informing re-emerging frontiers of investment (for agriculture, extraction, infrastructure), and shaping new dryland identities. The chapters in this volume discuss the politics of change triggered by forces as diverse as the global land and resource rush, the expansion of new Information and Communication Technologies, urbanization, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the spread of violent extremism. While recognizing that changes are co-produced by differently positioned actors from within and outside the drylands, this volume presents the dryland’s point of view. It therefore takes the views, experiences, and agencies of dryland dwellers as the point of departure to not only understand the changes that are transforming their lives, livelihoods, and future aspirations, but also to highlight the unexpected spaces of contestation and innovation that have hitherto remained understudied. This edited volume will be of much interest to students, researchers, and scholars of natural resource management, land and resource grabbing, political ecology, sustainable development, and drylands in general. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Large-Scale Land Acquisition in Ghana
Large-Scale Land Acquisition in Ghana

Author: Kristina Lanz

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-04-27

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1000581144

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This book examines a large-scale land acquisition project for rice production in Ghana’s Volta Region, which has been purported by some to be a social and ecological showcase of a company entering a "community–private partnership" with affected communities. Celebrated by national and international media, the project has received substantial amounts of funding from various donor organisations and claims to empower women through its much-lauded outgrower project. Although discourses of "development", "sustainability" and "women’s empowerment" are used by the investment company, the state and the customary authorities to legitimise the large-scale land acquisition, this book highlights how the deal benefits mainly the powerful elite, including elite women, and generally increases the depreciation of those already most marginalised, such as poor female-headed households and settler communities that were dependent on resources from the commons now enclosed and transformed into a rice farm. The author adopts a New Institutionalist perspective in social anthropology in order to analyse how this land acquisition has been implemented in a plural institutional context and how different actors use different rules and regulations and associated legitimating discourses to increase their bargaining power and to pursue their own interests in a changing legal context. In addition, this perspective shows how benefits and losses are distributed along different intersecting axes of power, such as class, gender, clan membership and age. By focusing on power, gender and legitimisation strategies in the context of institutional change caused by the large-scale land acquisition, this book fills a gap in the literature on large-scale land acquisitions while contributing to the development of a theoretical perspective on institutional change, power relations and ideological legitimisation. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of land and resource grabbing, agricultural development and agribusiness, land management and development studies more broadly.

Climate Change 2022 – Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability
Climate Change 2022 – Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability

Author: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-06-22

Total Pages: 3070

ISBN-13: 1009445383

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The Working Group II contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a comprehensive assessment of the scientific literature relevant to climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. The report recognizes the interactions of climate, ecosystems and biodiversity, and human societies, and integrates across the natural, ecological, social and economic sciences. It emphasizes how efforts in adaptation and in reducing greenhouse gas emissions can come together in a process called climate resilient development, which enables a liveable future for biodiversity and humankind. The IPCC is the leading body for assessing climate change science. IPCC reports are produced in comprehensive, objective and transparent ways, ensuring they reflect the full range of views in the scientific literature. Novel elements include focused topical assessments, and an atlas presenting observed climate change impacts and future risks from global to regional scales. Available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The Commons in a Glocal World
The Commons in a Glocal World

Author: Tobias Haller

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-04-30

Total Pages: 526

ISBN-13: 1351050974

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This volume focuses on how, in Europe, the debate on the commons is discussed in regard to historical and contemporary dimensions, critically referencing the work of Elinor Ostrom. It also explores from the perspective of new institutional political ecology (NIPE) how Europe directly and indirectly affected and affects the commons globally. Most of the research on the management of commons pool resources is limited to dealing with one of two topics: either the interaction between local participatory governance and development of institutions for commons management, or a political- economy approach that focuses on global change as it is related to the increasingly globalised expansion of capitalist modes of production, consumption and societal reproduction. This volume bridges the two, addressing how global players affect the commons worldwide and how they relate to responses emerging from within the commons in a global- local (glocal) world. Authors from a range of academic disciplines present research findings on recent developments on the commons, including: historical insights; new innovations for participatory institutions building in Europe or several types of commons grabbing, especially in Africa related to European investments; and restrictions on the management of commons at the international level. European case studies are included, providing interesting examples of local participation in commons resource management, while simultaneously showing Europe as a centre for globalized capitalism and its norms and values, affecting the rest of the world, particularly developing countries. This book will be of interest to students and researchers from a wide range of disciplines including natural resource management, environmental governance, political geography and environmental history.

Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of Nature
Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of Nature

Author: James Fairhead

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-10-29

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 1317850521

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Across the world, ecosystems are for sale. ‘Green grabbing’ – the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends – is an emerging process of deep and growing significance. A vigorous debate on ‘land grabbing’ already highlights instances where ‘green’ credentials are called upon to justify appropriations of land for food or fuel. Yet in other cases, environmental green agendas are the core drivers and goals of grabs. Green grabs may be drivn by biodiversity conservation, biocarbon sequestration, biofuels, ecosystem services or ecotourism, for example. In some cases theyse agendas involve the wholesale alienation of land, and in others the restructuring of rules and authority in the access, use and management of resources that may have profoundly alienating effects. Green grabbing builds on well-known histories of colonial and neo-colonial resource alienation in the name of the environment. Yet it involves novel forms of valuation, commodification and markets for pieces and aspects of nature, and an extraordinary new range of actors and alliances. This book draws together seventeen original cases from African, Asian and Latin American settings to ask: To what extent and in what ways do ‘green grabs’ constitute new forms of appropriation of nature? What political and discursive dynamics underpin ‘green grabs’? How and when do appropriations on the ground emerge out of circulations of green capital? What are the implications for ecologies, landscapes and livelihoods? Who is gaining and who is losing? How are agrarian social relations, rights and authority being restructured, and in whose interests? This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Alter-Globalization
Alter-Globalization

Author: Geoffrey Pleyers

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-04-23

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0745655084

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Contrary to the common view that globalization undermines social agency, ‘alter-globalization activists', that is, those who contest globalization in its neo-liberal form, have developed new ways to become actors in the global age. They propose alternatives to Washington Consensus policies, implement horizontal and participatory organization models and promote a nascent global public space. Rather than being anti-globalization, these activists have built a truly global movement that has gathered citizens, committed intellectuals, indigenous, farmers, dalits and NGOs against neoliberal policies in street demonstrations and Social Forums all over the world, from Bangalore to Seattle and from Porto Alegre to Nairobi. This book analyses this worldwide movement on the bases of extensive field research conducted since 1999. Alter-Globalization provides a comprehensive account of these critical global forces and their attempts to answer one of the major challenges of our time: How can citizens and civil society contribute to the building of a fairer, sustainable and more democratic co-existence of human beings in a global world?

Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism

Author: Damien Cahill

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2017-08-31

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0745695566

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For over three decades neoliberalism has been the dominant economic ideology. While it may have emerged relatively unscathed from the global financial crisis of 2007-8, neoliberalism is now - more than ever - under scrutiny from critics who argue that it has failed to live up to its promises, creating instead an increasingly unequal and insecure world. This book offers a nuanced and probing analysis of the meaning and practical application of neoliberalism today, separating myth from reality. Drawing on examples such as the growth of finance, the role of corporate power and the rise of workfare, the book advances a balanced but distinctive perspective on neoliberalism as involving the interaction of ideas, material economic change and political transformations. It interrogates claims about the impending death of neoliberalism and considers the sources of its resilience in the current climate of political disenchantment and economic austerity. Clearly and accessibly written, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars across the social sciences.