Abstract
Over the past decade land has again moved to the centre of resource conflicts, agrarian struggles, and competing visions over the future of food and farming. This renewed interest in land necessitates asking the seemingly simple, but pertinent, question ‘what is land?’ To reach a more profound understanding of the uniqueness of land, and what distinguishes land from other resources, this symposium suggests the notion of ‘land imaginaries’ as a crucial lens in the study of current land transformations. Political-economy, and the particular economic, financial, or political interests of various actors involved in land projects do not directly result in, or translate into, outcomes, such as dispossession and enclosure, increased commodification, financialization, and assetization, or mobilization and resistance. All these processes are informed by different imaginaries of land—the underlying understandings, views, and visions of what land is, can, and should be—and associated visions, hopes, and dreams regarding land. Drawing on a variety of case studies from across the world, crossing Global North/South and East/West, and including contemporary and historical instances of land transformation, this symposium addresses the multifaceted ways in which implicit, explicit, and emergent understandings of land shape current land transformations.
Highlights
Over the past decade land has again moved to the centre of resource conflicts, agrarian struggles, and competing visions over the future of food and farming
The renewed interest in land necessitated asking the seemingly simple, but pertinent, question ‘what is land?’ (Li 2014). How is it possible that something as banal as land has attracted so much renewed attention, and has been able to conjure up new investment vehicles (Clapp et al 2017); geopolitical conflicts (McMichael 2013); and worldwide political mobilizations (Borras and Franco 2013) after decades of urbanization, rural outmigration, de-agrarianization, and economic growth that has increasingly relied on seemingly footloose capital and digital economies? Within the land rush, investors and financial institutions sought to return to the ‘real’, 1 We use the terms Global North/South as a shorthand to distinguish contexts marked by highly industrialized agricultural systems (US, Canada, some parts of Europe, Australia, New Zealand) from those where smallholder farming structures prevail
We develop the notion of ‘land imaginaries’, drawing on the literature on ‘environmental imaginaries’ (Peet and Watts 1996; Mitchell 2011); ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ (Jasanoff 2015; Jasanoff and Kim 2015); and ‘spatial imaginaries’ (Wolford 2004; Watkins 2015)
Summary
Over the past decade land has again moved to the centre of resource conflicts, agrarian struggles, and competing visions over the future of food and farming. Scholars have critically investigated the role of China as another supposed ‘key driver’ of the land rush and have argued that Chinese investments are not as dominant and different from ‘Northern’ investments as is often suggested, as well as neither necessarily state-led or food security driven (Bräutigam and Zhang 2013; Oliveira 2018; Böhme 2020b) While these recent studies have added a more nuanced understanding of the unevenness, complications, and contradictions involved in current land transformations, this symposium seeks to go one step further by placing the emphasis on the ‘imaginaries’ of land, that is to say the various understandings of land that are implicitly or explicitly informing these projects in regard to land
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