Suchergebnisse

"In the twenty-first century, transnational land deals in the Global South have become increasingly prevalent and controversial. Widely seen as a new global land grab, transnational access to arable land in impoverished "land-rich" countries in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia highlights the link between the shifting geopolitics of economic development and problems of food security, climate change, and regional and international trade. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, Upland Geopolitics uses the case of Chinese agribusiness investment in northern Laos-one of China's first sustained forays into foreign land deals during the boom years of the early 2000s-to study the unbalanced geography of the new global land rush. Contemporary Laos serves as a stage on which the growing frustration with traditional Western assistance is leading to new forms of South-South development cooperation. Connecting the current rubber plantation boom to a longer trajectory of foreign intervention in the region, Upland Geopolitics reveals how legacies of Cold War conflict continue to pave the way for transnational enclosure in a socially uneven landscape"--

Enclosure, dispossession and displacement loom large in current debates about the recent boom in transnational farmland deals, and about Chinese agribusiness for export in particular. Often under-examined, however, are the ways that legacies of geopolitical conflict shape the inevitably uneven distribution of enclosure, dispossession and displacement. This paper constructs a case of these 'micro-geopolitical' legacies by examining a Chinese rubber planting 'promotion' project in northwestern Laos's emerging 'Golden Quadrangle' development region. It argues that longstanding concerns about security inform the ways that local authorities deploy investment projects that are otherwise seen as examples of 'foreign' land grabbing. Further, it shows that while the geographical aims of foreign agribusiness mesh with state-mediated resettlement efforts (a darker spin on the narrative of 'win-win' cooperation), these activities often precede current land deals rather than result from them. Chinese agribusiness in Laos's upland interior thus appears less as a driver of displacement than a means for attempting to secure in place a particular (if precarious) configuration of population and security. Adapted from the source document.

ABSTRACTThe recent proliferation of transnational land deals has put the long‐fraught relationship between international cooperation, national development and local dispossession back in the political spotlight. This article argues that transnational land access cannot be resolved as a political question without a better understanding of the material, legal and administrative geographies that accompany and enable it. Using evidence from Laos, the paper illustrates two tools for 'resolving' the global land grab geographically: first, a biographical or trajectory‐based approach that connects specific land grabs to larger development landscapes (e.g. of urban infrastructuring); and second, genealogies of property formalization that interrogate and deconstruct the legal geographies of land access, both on and off the map. The paper concludes by suggesting that these tools have purchase elsewhere as well.

Forested landscapes play a critical role in mitigating climate change by sequesteringcarbon while at the same time fostering adaption by supporting ecosystem services, therecognition of which is reflected in the recent Paris Agreement on climate change. It has beensuggested, therefore, that the conservation of forested landscapes may provide a potential win-win in the fight against global environmental change. Despite the potential synergies betweenmitigation and adaptation efforts, recent studies have also raised concerns about possible trade-offs. Our research employs the analytic lens of social-ecological resilience to explore theintersection between mitigation and adaptation in the context of a Reduced Emissions fromDeforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) project in Lao PDR. Drawing on ecosystemanalyses, group discussions and interviews with policy makers, practitioners and resource-dependent communities, we identify three potential limitations of REDD for achieving climatesynergies. First, by disrupting existing disturbance regimes, REDD interventions run the riskof reducing diversity and structural heterogeneity and thus may undermine functional redun-dancy core to resilience. Second, REDD-as-practiced has tended to select local, rather thanstructural, drivers of deforestation, focusing disproportionately on curtailing local livelihoodpractices, reducing local resources for adaptation. Third, REDD risks redirecting ecosystemservice benefits away from local communities toward state agencies, incentivizing recentrali-zation and limiting the scope of local governance. We argue that REDD's potential fordelivering synergies between climate change mitigation and adaptation in Laos is currentlyattenuated by structural factors rooted in development policies and broader political-economictrajectories in ways that may not be legible to, or adequately addressed by, current programmesand policy.

Introduction : Turning Land into Capital / Philip Hirsch, Kevin Woods, Natalia Scurrah and Michael Dwyer -- Land and Capital across Borders : A Regional Geopolitics / Natalia Scurrah and Philip Hirsch -- Legacies in Land Governance : Colonialism, War and Socialism / Kevin Woods, Michael Dwyer and Jean-Christophe Diepart -- Agrarian Modernization and Counter-Land Reforms : Ideologies and Realities / Jean-Christophe Diepart and Christian Castellanet -- Grounding Land Justice : Contested Principles, Processes and Outcomes / Carl Middleton and Vanessa Lamb -- Land Commodification, State Formation, and Agrarian Capitalism : The Political Economy of Land Governance in Cambodia / Jean-Christophe Diepart and Carl Middleton -- "Thirty Thousand Hectares Will Not Be a Problem" : The Politics of Large-Scale Land Development in Laos / Michael Dwyer -- Legacies of Race, Ethnicity, and War : Contemporary Land Governance Reform in Myanmar / Kevin Woods -- Movement, Counter-Movement, and Regionalization of Capital : The Dynamics of Land Relations in Thailand / Philip Hirsch -- Land from the Tiller : The Politics of "Land Recovery" in Vietnam / Nga Dao and Marie Mellac -- Conclusion : A Regional Approach to Land Capitalization / Philip Hirsch, Kevin Woods, Natalia Scurrah and Michael Dwyer.