A new book examines the state’s role in land deals through theoretical insights and empirical studies from around the globe.
Governing Global Land Deals: The Role of the State in the Rush for Land analyses the relationships between global land grabs and processes of government and governance.
STEPS co-director Ian Scoones is among the editors.
Governing Global Land Deals: The Role of the State in the Rush for Land
edited by Wendy Wolford, Saturnino M. Borras, Jr., Ruth Hall, Ian Scoones and Ben White
- Buy Governing Global Land Deals from the publishers: Wiley Blackwell
Available in paperback or as an e-book
Note: The articles in this collection previously appeared in a special issue of Development and Change.
Related books
The Journal of Peasant Studies special issue on The Politics of Biofuels, Land and Agrarian Change is now available as a paperback: buy from Amazon.
These titles are linked to the work of the Land Deal Politics Initiative.
More information
From the back cover:
“Over the past decade, there has been a dramatic increase in large–scale land deals, often from public lands to the hands of foreign or domestic investors. Popularly referred to as a ‘global land grab’, new land acquisitions are drawing upon, restructuring and challenging the nature of both governance and government. While ‘the state’ is often invoked as a key player in contemporary land deals, states do not necessarily operate coherently or with one voice.
This collection of essays brings clarity and understanding to the entity of ‘the state’, analyzing government and governance as processes, people and relationships. Focusing on relations of territory, sovereignty, authority and subjects, the essays in this collection explore the highly variable form and content of large–scale land deals in different settings around the world, illuminating both the micro–processes of transaction and expropriation, as well as the broader structural forces at play in global land deals. The authors do not assume a priori that there is a necessary character to land deals, rather they frame the deals themselves quite broadly, as embedded in complex multi–scalar webs of relationships shaped by power, property and production.”