Addressing the impacts of large-scale land investments: Re-engaging with livelihood research

What started as a media-driven hype about the global land rush has developed into a well-established academic debate on land governance and an important domain for policy intervention. Research over the past decade has deepened our understanding of how land, water and forests, which were once considered to be local assets and the sources of livelihoods, are transformed into global goods and the focus of capital investments. We are now clearly aware that such transformation generates significant impacts on the livelihood security of vulnerable groups. In response to this, a variety of policy interventions have been devised to minimize the negative impacts (‘do not harm’) and create new opportunities (‘do good’). Yet, it is still unclear how actual policy implementations play out on the ground, what the real impacts are at the local level and whether these interventions help people to improve their livelihoods. In this paper, we present an overview of the existing intervention approaches and their theoretical underpinnings, and discuss how to optimize the developmental outcomes. We argue that the once popular livelihood research framework should be revised and then incorporated more robustly in the existing intervention approaches, as it could help investors and governmental actors to engage in making their investments more relevant to local development.     

Land sharing not sparing in the “green economy”: The role of livelihood bricolage in conservation and development in the Philippines

In Southeast Asia’s green economy, conservation interventions intensify the production of resources as commodities through land sparing activities and zoning in extensively used landscapes. Such initiatives encounter problems where poor resource users diversify livelihoods in multi-functional landscapes over time. In terms of ‘livelihood bricolage’ – the mixing, matching and building of portfolios – we describe how forest users enhance security by building dynamic livelihood portfolios based on the economic and socio-cultural considerations of place. Philippine case studies show how disrupting livelihood bricolage in multi-functional landscapes with ‘intensifying interventions’ spatially constrains livelihood security and conservation objectives. We conclude that more equitable forest governance supports land sharing with diverse, extensive livelihoods in varied landscapes.     

From post-politics to a politics of possibility? Unravelling the privatization of the Berlin Water Company

This article explores the constraints and contingencies of contemporary urban governance, with reference to the partial privatization (1999) and partial remunicipalization (2012) of the Berlin Water Company (BWB). It outlines the processes through which this major shift in Berlin politics occurred, showing how the mainstream consensus on privatization was disrupted and alternatives to apparent neoliberal conformity emerged. Dynamics apparent in the BWB case – commercialization, privatization, re-regulation, public contestation and remunicipalization – are indicative of the challenges and opportunities of making policy in and beyond the global norms of neoliberalism. It is argued that this case is important because it reveals something about what we might call the “politics of possibility” within the paradigm of neoliberal urban governance: the continuing potential for change within the constraints of an urban governance configured to the logics and needs of markets. Given this, the paper concludes that local contingencies in urban governance problematize sweeping notions of a post-political condition. However observable post-political strategies and outcomes in Berlin and elsewhere are, researchers should not assume that they are inevitably dominant or universal.     

Imageries of the contested concepts “land grabbing” and “land transactions”: Implications for biofuels investments in Ghana

In Ghana, the contested concepts of “land grabbing” and “land transaction” are strategically applied by proponents of critical and win–win discourses respectively to describe outcomes of land deals. Using case study methods and discourse analysis, this paper explores four cases of biofuels investments in Ghana and the implications of the choice of concepts used to represent them. Proponents of the critical discourse use the “land grabbing” concept to invoke imageries of “illegality”, “theft” and “food insecurity” when describing land deals. Consequently, some biofuels investments have been hampered in their potential to generate profit and local employment. The biofuel investors in this study, whose projects have been labeled “land grabbing”, therefore switched to food production to downplay public scepticism. Proponents of the win–win discourse portray biofuels investments as “pro-poor” projects and use the “land transaction” concept to pre-empt possible public criticisms in the media and elsewhere. Such representations of these biofuels investments are therefore mainly intended to pre-empt criticisms or attract public praise. Some projects with potentially promising outcomes have thus been terminated, while others with problematic outcomes have continued to be promoted. In contexts characterized by weak land regulations and ambivalence towards large-scale agriculture, the trajectory and outcomes of biofuels investments are often influenced by land deal representations drawn from global discourses and how they interact with pre-existing local discourses.     

Access to land reconsidered: The land grab,polycentric governance and Tanzania’s new wave land reform

Inspired by Ostrom’s concept of polycentric governance, this article aims to refine the analytical framework through which contemporary access to land is analysed. By drawing on extensive fieldwork and conducting a review of the existing literature on the making and implementation of Tanzania’s 1999 land reform, it challenges some of the main assumptions behind the land access and land grabbing literatures about the level at which agency is placed. Processes governing access to land are more contingent than they are most often depicted, involving actors at the local, national and international levels. National and local level actors are often more important than, in particular, the land grab literature tends to suggest. This implies that the state should be seen not merely as a site of ‘legitimate theft’, but also as one in which rights may be upheld. Based on the experience of Tanzania, the article suggests that analytical a priori assumptions about where agency is placed should be abandoned and replaced with empirical research into the relations between actors at all levels.     

Emplacement and the dispossessions of cosmopolitan capital

Ananya Roy’s theorization of the urban land question in terms of ‘dis/possessive collectivism’ is a powerful, eloquent intervention at a pivotal moment of intensified, planetary urban land inequalities. In this commentary, we evaluate Roy’s call to identify sites of “strategic illegality” from which to challenge the racial and class inequalities of capitalist colonization of urban land and property. Our analysis focuses on three transformations – evolving jurisdictional geographies, expanded proliferations of disparate impact, and reinforced infrastructures of monetized universalization – in which old, familiar exploitations are produced through the new multicultural meritocracies of an increasingly transnational, cosmopolitan capitalism.     

青岛市土地市场调查分析（2007年1月-2008年9月）

随着国际国内经济形势的转向,青岛市土地市场也不可避免地受到影响,呈现出一些新的特点,如土地价格回落,成交面积略有下降,成交金额升势趋缓,招拍挂土地的结构发生变化等。为了保障青岛房地产业的稳定,建议深化市场调研,控制土地供应节奏,大力发展城市交通设施,加快推进旧城改造。     

“I Still Have the Old Tradition”: The co-production of sweetgrass basketry and coastal development

Scholars working around the world have drawn attention to the physical and social changes associated with rural gentrification. Case studies from the United States have focused on how these patterns lead to the cultural displacement and replacement of land-based livelihoods, including non-timber forest product (NTFP) practices. Scholars have also documented the persistence of culturally and economically important NTFP practices in urban and suburban areas. We reconcile these disparate outcomes, displacement on the one hand and persistence on the other, by focusing on the social relationships that co-produce land use and livelihood change. Our case investigates how African American sweetgrass basketmakers in Mount Pleasant South Carolina negotiate the complex terrain of a rapidly urbanizing and gentrifying landscape.Analysis of interviews with basketmakers and participant observation at public meetings suggests that gathering materials and selling baskets occur across spaces not typically considered important for NTFP practices. Access to these sites depends upon continually reinforced and negotiated social relationships between a variety of actors. Findings illustrate that, by themselves, development and gentrification are insufficient for explaining livelihood and land use patterns that emerge in places experiencing intensive development. Using a co-production framework, we acknowledge the wide variety of complex trajectories and local power dynamics shaping land use and livelihoods. Findings also have implications for connecting global research on housing, employment, and demographic transitions associated with rural gentrification, to international NTFP research, which is increasingly turning to rural–urban interfaces for insights on how livelihoods are linked to land development and migration.     

Manila’s metropolitan landscape of gentrification: Global urban development,accumulation by dispossession & neoliberal warfare against informality

A new regime of gentrification is dramatically restructuring Manila’s metropolitan landscape. Grounded upon an on-going neoliberal warfare of accumulation by dispossession, this gentrification serves as the fulfillment of postcolonial visions of a world class and modern metropolis through public–private arrangements and market-oriented developments but necessitates the systematic demolition of informal settlements, the home of the Manila’s urban poor and working class population. Through a mixed-methods approach, this paper examines gentrification’s spatial forms and trajectories and exposes context specific dynamics facilitating accumulation by dispossession. Using barangay (village)-level data on changes in population of informal households and median zonal values, I calculate for local measures of spatial autocorrelation and locate significant clusters of spatial shifts. Using the quantitative results plus field narratives and community histories, I triangulate local dynamics of accumulation by dispossession. What emerges is a sprawling gentrification process that, in producing a market-oriented metropolis, displaces and asphyxiates informal spaces. These accounts illustrate the contingencies of violence, neoliberal urbanism, colonial legacies of land regimes, and elite power in the production of a globally-competitive Manila. With other Global South megacities similarly competing in the global market, gentrification in Manila, with its expanding landscape of property accumulation and ’legitimized’ dispossession, is instructive of the emerging form of gentrification in the 21st century.     

Cloning colonialism: Residential development,transnational aspiration,and the complexities of postcolonial India

Within this article, we discuss/unpack a speculative international property development born out of a license agreement between the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and real estate investment company, Anglo Indian. The proposed building of twelve cloned, MCC branded, cricket communities in India–targeted to the consumption-based lifestyles of India’s new middle class–is addressed within the context relational to the political, economic, and cultural rationalities of postcolonial India, shifting power dynamics within the international cricket formation, and the associated re-colonisation of cricket-related spaces/bodies. Anglo Indian’s proposed communities are understood as part of a complex assemblage of national and global forces and relations (including, but certainly not restricted to): transnational gentrification; urban (re)development; and, revised understandings of historical and geographic connections between places, governance, and the politics of be(long)ing in branded spaces. This analysis explicates how Anglo Indian’s idealized community development offers a literal and figurative space for embodied performance of “glocal competence” for consumption-based identity projects of the new Indian middle-class (Brosius, 2010, p. 13) through the somewhat ironic mobilization of colonial spatial logics and cultural aesthetics.     

Water reform governmentality in Ecuador: Neoliberalism,centralization, and the restraining of polycentric authority and community rule-making

In most Latin American countries, issues concerning water governance and control also reflect broader conflicts over authority and legitimacy between the state and civil society. What lies behind the diverse water policy reforms is not simply a question of governing water affairs but also a drive to control or co-opt water user groups. This paper examines the efforts by the present Ecuadorian government to ‘control water users’ through new forms of ‘governmentality’ (Foucault, 1991). We use the ‘cathedral and bazaar’ metaphor (Lankford and Hepworth, 2010) to illustrate government rationale and practices in water governance shifts in the last decades. We analyze how Rafael Correa’s government sets out to reshape the relations between state, market and society. In its ‘Twenty-first Century Socialism’ project, based on a proclaimed ‘Citizen Revolution’, actual policy reform does not reverse but rather transforms the process of neoliberalizing water governance – creating a hybrid bazaar-cathedral model. We argue that the current water govermentality project implements reforms that do not challenge established market-based water governance foundations. Rather it aims to contain and undermine communities’ autonomy and ‘unruly’ polycentric rule-making, which are the result of both historical and present-day processes of change. Interestingly, water user federations that emerged during the neoliberal wave of the last two decades now claim water control space and search for new forms of democratizing water governance. They act as agents who fiercely – yet selectively and strategically – oppose both elements of the State-centered (cathedral) and market-based (bazaar) water governance models.     

Everyday human (in)securities in protected urban nature – Collaborative conservation at Macassar/Wolfgat dunes nature reserves,Cape Town,South Africa

The diverse residents of the urban global South experience insecurities in everyday, immediate and subjective ways. Lemanski argues these insecurities relate not only to physical concerns like fear, crime, and violence but also to stressors like insecure tenure and financial situations, and threatened and contested lifestyles and cultures as cities rapidly change. This paper considers how diverse ‘everyday human (in)securities’ manifest through urban nature and shape collaborations around nature conservation. The focus is on protected coastal dunes in Cape Town and collaborative conservation participants, including municipal nature conservators and community representatives from the adjacent apartheid-era ‘townships’. The diverse ‘everyday human (in)securities’ perceived and experienced by these participants manifest variously in physical threats to bodies and biodiversity, but also in relation to the insecure tenure and financial situations experienced by residents and conservators alike, alongside differing cultural values of nature. Through attention to diffuse power relations and everyday experiences, divergent perceptions of (in)security are shown to be frictional and sometimes paradoxical in nature. Yet identifying these (in)securities also holds potential for exploring hopeful and productive negotiations around what ‘security’ might mean, and how it might be realised through the collaborations – bringing into dialogue contested spaces of urban nature in cities of the global South and North.     

City centre retail development in England: Land assembly and business experiences of area change processes

The period stemming from the late 1990s has witnessed the emergence of large scale city centre retail developments across England. Such projects have received government support because of their association with urban sustainability, in addition to the potential to catalyse broader regeneration and gentrification processes. Whereas some early projects proceeded relatively quickly, other schemes were delayed by complex land assembly requirements. Investigating beyond the formal compulsory purchase process, this paper draws on small businesses’ experiences of the land assembly process to provide a critical perspective on contemporary urban developments. It does so by drawing on interview material collected from small businesses affected by a proposed Retail Core Expansion within the city of Wolverhampton. By analysing attitudes towards communication practices, compensation discussions and relocation assistance, the picture is painted of an exclusionary development model and of limited support for existing land interests. Although active business responses are recognised, anxiety was prevalent because of the overwhelming dominance of future-orientated horizons and narratives.     

Farming the urban fringes of Barcelona: Competing visions of nature and the contestation of a partial sustainability fix

While the concept of urban agriculture investigates the way in which disused land within the consolidated city is returned to its citizens through a variety of farming practices, many pockets of rural land in peri-urban areas continue to be contested by institutions and communities – including informal farmers, formal farmers, municipal planners, metropolitan agencies, and investors – with contrasting interests. To date however, little scholarly attention has been paid to informal practices within the degraded areas of urban fringes and, more specifically, to the link between the expansion of peri-urban agriculture and the civic appropriation and negotiation of space in neglected peripheral areas. In this paper, we ask how a metropolitan sustainability fix is produced and contested both materially and discursively. We also explore how local residents involved in peri-urban agriculture claim the use of land for agricultural practices and in turn attempt to influence the urban agenda of the neoliberal city. Inquiring how competing visions of nature act as obstacles in this negotiation process, our analysis of the peri-urban Baix Llobregat Agricultural Park in Barcelona reveals that the imposition of official visions about how needs for food and agriculture should be fulfilled, which landscapes are esthetically acceptable, what nature is, and how land should be controlled and developed indicate why apparently “marginal” and informal urban agriculture in the periphery has come to be subordinated to the planning of the neoliberal city and of a metropolitan sustainability fix – a partial sustainability fix that is however progressively being questioned and renegotiated.     

How effective is inclusive innovation without participation?

The last few years have seen an upsurge in the field of innovation studies especially ‘inclusive innovation’, aiming not only at economic but social development. In developing countries, like India, inclusive innovation must incorporate governance and for governance to be inclusive, it should encompass participation by all, especially the marginalized, to make public policies efficacious and deliverable. I argue that any model of inclusive innovation needs to take cognizance of participation by all stakeholders. The objective of innovation must be to enable and empower people at the periphery through awareness, accessibility and democratic deliberations rather than solely aiming at economic outcomes. There is a need to debate on the ‘inclusiveness’ of innovation and make it more participative. Such an endeavour may help promote United Nation’s sustainable development goals by making governance participatory and expediting the process of social justice.     

Urban sprawl and infrastructural lands: Revamping internal spaces in Santiago de Chile

Urban sprawl in South America has for many decades been driven by the housing debate, with major impact on overall urban development. The impact of uncontrolled expansion has been social, economic and environmental degradation to high rates of poverty, poor services and transport. The presence of undeveloped areas within suburban landscapes, such as former infrastructural facilities, obsolete airports, and abandoned train stations, contribute to the impetus to reclaimed and revamped land. These spaces also trigger political aspirations for implementing better practices on “smart” growth, sustainable development and urban regeneration principles. A case in point is the former airport ‘Aeropuerto Cerrillos’ in Santiago, Chile, which closed in 2001 after years of decay; it intended to replace and host a large-scale urban project called ‘Ciudad Parque Bicentenario’. This development is still incomplete and describes a series of pressures on a planning system traditionally adjusted to promote expansion confirming that urban sprawl is still an open agenda triggered by the presence of diverse unexpected urban gaps.     

The future of informal settlements: lessons in the legalization of disputed urban land in Recife, Brazil

The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between legalization of land tenure and people's capacity to compete for and sustain their stake in the urban land market. Two aspects of land regularization are taken into account: the benefits of land regularization (as collateral for investments); and the perverse aspects of disputes over improved land (due to increased scarcity of illegal, but affordable housing land). Most research on illegal urban land has systematically investigated how to legalize illegal settlements to improve the effectiveness of service provision, whilst attracting public investments. But, few understand the underlying factors motivating people to improve and consolidate their houses where no legal tenure exists. The absence of substantial understanding about people's perceptions of their tenure security has encouraged most research to conclude that improving tenure security leads to higher levels of housing consolidation. What this paper shows is that the relationship between people's perceptions of land tenure security and housing consolidation is much more malleable and complex than conventionally assumed. The subtle difference between tenure of the land and tenure of the house indicates that people are willing to invest in their housing conditions almost irrespectively of their land tenure situation. This finding challenges the orthodox views of the property rights school of thought. In addition, this paper contends that what legalization is really doing is to reduce the available land stock for the poorest families, because legalization decreases the amount of illegal land (illegal land is undesirable, but affordable for the poor). The orthodox legal system needs to be revised to include the poorest families in the urban society of the new millennium.     

Grassroots masquerades: Development,paramilitaries, and land laundering in Colombia

This article shows how paramilitaries and allied companies put grassroots development discourses of political participation and subsidiarity, environmental conservation, and ethnic empowerment to work in executing and ratifying their massive land grab in northwest Colombia. More than a case of trying to “whitewash” their malfeasance with fashionable and politically correct development-speak, I argue that the grassroots development apparatus—its discourses, institutional forms, and practices—became utterly instrumental to the illegal land seizures. Moreover, when operating alongside practices of land parcelization, iterative transactions, producers’ cooperatives, and third-party intermediaries, grassroots development facilitated what could be called “land laundering.” In the process, grassroots development became a conduit for paramilitary-backed state formation in which projects of liberal governance commonly associated with the imperatives of institution building, good governance, and the rule of law became perversely compatible with the region’s economies of violence. With the World Bank increasingly concerned over the conflation of fragile states, violent conflict, and alarming land grabs, this article raises questions about how the grassroots solutions currently being endorsed by the Bank can in some cases actually facilitate dispossession, illicit economies, and violent political projects. The way paramilitaries harnessed grassroots development also has critical implications for debates about post-development.     

Vulnerability and resistance to neoliberal environmental changes: An assessment of agriculture and forestry in the Biobio region of Chile (1974–2014)

This article examines the dynamics of double exposure, vulnerability, and resistance to neoliberal globalization and environmental change in the Chilean agricultural region of Biobio. By using climatic models and secondary Agricultural Census data from 1997 and 2007, we assess how Chilean neoliberal reforms have, since 1974, facilitated land use changes and forestry investments. We demonstrate that policy changes which incentivize forestry investments have reduced cultivated agricultural lands and native forest, and concentrated land in the hands of global agribusiness corporations. Compounding these issues, Biobio shows a climatic trend towards aridity coupled with an increasing demand for irrigation. Analyzing these conditions, we argue that the neoliberal globalization of regional agriculture under the context of climatic changes has produced a regional space of increasing vulnerabilities and uneven geographical development in Biobio. We particularly demonstrate that the Chilean mode of agricultural neoliberalization has been conducive to land dispossession—to the detriment of traditional agriculture —and has homogenized the biophysical landscape, replacing traditional crops and native forests with exotic species like pines and eucalyptus. We also examine how local producers are using resistance movements to cope with and contest neoliberal environmental changes. We conclude by evaluating the implications of these spaces of agricultural vulnerabilities and local resistances in the context of uneven geographical development at a regional and global scale.     

浅谈枣庄市市中区基准地价成果分析及应用

城区土地级别和基准地价是城市土地利用情况的反映,它客观地揭示了城区内不同区段土地使用价值及变化规律,是政府宏观调控土地市场、科学合理配置土地资产的有效手段。随着枣庄市市中区经济建设发展和城市规划的实施,城市基础设施不断完善,带动了城市房地产市场健康发展和土地使用权价格稳定上涨。该文通过对枣庄市市中区新一轮基准地价更新成果的详细分析,探讨了基准地价更新成果在城市经济发展中的应用。