Abstract
Throughout the last decade, the international donor community has developed a plethora of regulatory initiatives for responsible agricultural investments. It remains unclear how such guidelines are invoked in practice in investment cases, and whether their use can prevent conflict and protect local land rights, as promoted. Uncovering how international guidelines work necessitates an understanding of the formal-legal setting and underlying land tenure regimes that shape investment projects. In Uganda, these contexts vary from region to region and investments take place on land held under various tenure regimes, including private, state-owned, and customary land. Based on 8 months of fieldwork in Uganda, I compare three cases of large-scale land investments in different settings and argue that variation in the underlying land tenure systems determines the variation, uneven applicability and effectiveness of global governance mechanisms.
Highlights
The management of conflict associated with the rise of foreign large-scale land investments in the developing world is a prominent topic on the global governance agenda
This paper has extended the scope of theorisation around land tenure regimes to a new domain, namely, the role of international guidelines in influencing large-scale land investments in African countries
I argued that the adherence to global governance norms by various actors is shaped by whether and how the land rights in question are already legally recognised and protected by the state, which varies from one tenure regime to another
Summary
The management of conflict associated with the rise of foreign large-scale land investments in the developing world is a prominent topic on the global governance agenda. International guidelines which seek to protect the land use rights of poor people currently occupying the land are most likely to be effective on land tenure regimes where local land rights and claims are already state recognised as legal rights of occupancy (i.e. enforceable in a court of law). If this is the case, ‘outside pressure’ by international donor and civil society actors may be effective in getting states to adhere to their own laws and to incorporate further global governance norms for responsible investment.
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