Green Grabbing Research Articles

Green Grab by Bricolage – The Institutional Workings of Community Conservancies in Kenya

Across Kenya's arid and semi-arid lands, vast rangelands are being transformed into community conservancies – common property arrangements managed for transhumance pastoralism and biodiversity conservation. The Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) has spearheaded this transformation, promoting community conservancies as a model that conserves biodiversity while developing resilience, improving livelihoods, and promoting security among diverse pastoralist groups in Kenya. Building on recent critical engagement with the NRT model, this article reframes community conservancies as green grabs. In doing so, it makes two overarching contributions to wider debates. The first contribution complicates stereotypes about ‘grabbers’ and ‘grabbees’ and unsettles crude distinctions between political reactions to green grabs, social phenomena commonly portrayed as enacted from above and reacted to from below. Using the concept of bricolage, we show how actors at multiple scales with multiple identities participate – consciously and unconsciously – in reshaping institutional arrangements for managing communal lands and natural resources to align with conservation. The second contribution reveals how power works through emergent hybrid institutions, producing undesired and unintended outcomes. With this in mind, the article concludes that green grab by bricolage produces contradictory spaces animated by a seemingly adaptive, innovative, and progressive agenda, but constrained by historical patterns of access, accumulation, and domination.

Private Protected Areas in Latin America: Between conservation, sustainability goals and economic interests. A review

Worldwide, but particularly in Latin America, private protected areas (PPAs), including in mountain areas, have become increasingly numerous. In some Latin American countries, PPAs complement the public protected areas to a significant degree. Beneficiaries of these private protection initiatives, which often close gaps in fragmented biomes, may be governments or eco-tourism operators. Drawbacks of PPAs are the lack of clear definitions and ownership, the absence of suitable management, green grabbing, and limited government support. This article gives an overview of PPAs in mountain regions and presents the most important literature published so far.

Under Pressure: Conceptualising Political Ecologies of Green Wars

This article introduces the special issue on 'Political Ecologies of Green Wars' and the research papers comprising it. While state-authorised and state-directed forms of violence in support of conservation have been evident in many places for quite some time, the current scope, scale and rhetorical justification of the violent defence of biodiversity seem quite unprecedented in the history of global conservation. We, therefore, ask whether and how the term green wars may be appropriate to describe this new intensity of violence and the changes in environmental governance it signifies. In bringing together a number of important recent discussions around green grabbing, green militarisation/violence, green economy, neoliberal conservation and biopower, amongst others, the special issue emphasises the increasingly central role of environmental and conservation concerns within the global political economy as a whole. In the process, it also points towards an overarching conceptual framing for understanding these conjoined dynamics in terms of an 'intensification of pressure' precipitated by the combined yet uneven magnification and integration of power and capital within the world today. Consequently, we argue that the concept of green wars potentially heralds the new twenty- first century 'real-politik' of the centrality of violence and conflict both to the neoliberal political economy and to environmental conservation, and their integrated socio-ecological manifestations and effects.

Land grabbing in Mexico: extent, scale, purpose and novelty

The expression “land grabbing” has been used to describe large scale land transactions in developing nations; buyers or contractors usually are governments or companies of industrialized nations. This paper addresses the extension, scale, purpose and novelty of land grabbing, as well as two major debates around this issue: the contribution of land transactions (if any) to rural development; the role of rural actors in the process. The paper focuses on Latin America and the Caribbean, with particular emphasis on Mexico. Land grabbing in the region involves not only the production of “flex crops”, but also “commodity grabs” and “green grabs”. Mexico presents a very high concentration and foreignization of the agricultural chain value, which is expressed in various forms of contract agriculture. Current processes of land grabbing are different from others occurring in the past because they are a new way to respond to the multiple dimensions of the global crisis: financial, food, energy and climate. The paper concludes that more research is needed on the impacts of land grabbing on rural communities, particularly from a differentiated and comparative approach capable of highlighting regional, class, age, and gender disparities.

Building a green economy of low carbon: the Greek post-crisis experience of photovoltaics and financial 'green grabbing'

Abstract Under the global rhetoric of 'the green economy' Renewable Energy Resources (RES) projects have proliferated across the world. This article examines the growth of photovoltaic projects in post-crisis Greece, grounded in a green energy discourse. The aim is to provide insights into how green economies are built and what new appropriations they (might) entail. It is based on a Foucauldian oriented discourse analysis, in depth semi-structured interviews and review of a variety of other sources. The article argues that justificatory discourses for green growth implicated in 'green grabbing' involve the complex interplay of neoliberal and disciplinary 'environmentalities.' These seek to construct 'green economy' entrepreneurs and compliant subjects. A relatively undocumented and understudied aspect of green grabs is the appropriation of public and private financial resources for photovoltaic projects, with significant negative impacts on livelihoods. In Greece, this has resulted in the accumulation of capital by a few large RES companies, as well as significant impacts on the livelihoods of domestic and small business electricity consumers and small/medium photovoltaic investors through debt. Key words: Greece, green economy, photovoltaics, green grabbing, environmentality, Foucault, green energy

Property and Difference in Nature Conservation

Social science research on nature conservation ascribes enclosures and the consequent evictions and dispossession of local people to unequal power relations. It reveals that the monopoly of power by the state configures new relations between local people and their natural resources, and legitimizes land grabbing. In this paper we build on this literature by engaging two questions. The first question relates to how land tenure regimes enable green grabbing and also configure the participation of local people in nature conservation enterprises. Knowing how land tenure regimes structure the involvement of local people in nature conservation is a necessary step toward an inquiry into the relationship between local people and protected areas. In the second question we ask how historical land tenure allocations enable current configurations of power relations in conservation areas. We use the case study of Mapungubwe on the Botswana‐South Africa‐Zimbabwe borderlands to demonstrate that historical land tenure allocations facilitate land alienation and the marginalization of local people in s.

Separating Sisters From Brothers: Ethnic Relations and Identity Politics in the Context of Indigenous Land Titling in Indonesia

Environmental and social transformations in Jambi province, Indonesia, are inextricably interlinked. Large-scale agro-industrial development and nature conservation policies equally alienate local communities from their agricultural lands and turn land into a scarce resource. Consequently, access to agricultural land becomes increasingly contested, not only between communities and state institutions or companies but also among communities themselves. To secure or restore local ‘indigenous’ land rights against land grabbing and green grabbing by states and companies, indigenous land titling has become a powerful tool all over the world. Ongoing activities of indigenous land titling in Indonesia have been largely perceived as an act of justice by indigenous and land rights activists and affected communities. Yet, a challenging step towards titling is the identification of who is and who is not ‘indigenous’. This highly political process creates ethnicity-based identities tied to rights and possibilities around land as a contested resource. Based on a case study of a national park in central Jambi, this paper shows that what is perceived as an act of justice against the state can also produce injustice among local communities by heavily impacting and transforming local social structures and relations.

Land grabs and the river: eco-social transformations along the Kapuas, Indonesia

ABSTRACTLand grabbing is transforming the Kapuas River in Indonesia from a space of life and livelihood to one of illness and ecological collapse, and “green grabs” to mitigate climate change are equally implicated. Appropriation and accumulation strategies differ according to resource (minerals, lumber, oil palm, fish), scale of operations (smallholders, transnational firms) and the relationships among the economic and political actors, but our fieldwork confirms that the effects of the various socio-economic transformations are interlinked. Action research with local communities has identified the river’s – as yet unrealised – potential to connect and scale up otherwise isolated struggles against land grabs.

Green grabbing debate and Madagascar: did we learn anything?

Green grabbing is a scholarly critique of conservation efforts. Scholars of green grabbing argue that many conservation strategies - such as the designation of protected areas and the creation of market-based conservation mechanisms - are designed with the intent to dispossess local peoples and capitalise natural assets. First, to provide some context on the green grabbing debate, we discuss the trade-offs between conservation and development objectives. In addition, we refer briefly to the broader land grabbing debate of which green grabbing is a sub-component. Second, we question the theoretical foundations of green grabbing, the concepts of primitive accumulation and commodification of nature. Third, we compare data collected by the green grabbing scholars and conservation NGOs from the very same site in Madagascar. We conclude that rigorous post-intervention stakeholder analysis, rather than pre-intervention analysis, is needed to effectively evaluate conservation outcomes, and that research on conservation strategies should pay attention to the role of the state, and the heterogeneity of local communities.

Green grabbing debate and Madagascar: did we learn anything?

Green grabbing is a scholarly critique of conservation efforts. Scholars of green grabbing argue that many conservation strategies - such as the designation of protected areas and the creation of market-based conservation mechanisms - are designed with the intent to dispossess local peoples and capitalise natural assets. First, to provide some context on the green grabbing debate, we discuss the trade-offs between conservation and development objectives. In addition, we refer briefly to the broader land grabbing debate of which green grabbing is a sub-component. Second, we question the theoretical foundations of green grabbing, the concepts of primitive accumulation and commodification of nature. Third, we compare data collected by the green grabbing scholars and conservation NGOs from the very same site in Madagascar. We conclude that rigorous post-intervention stakeholder analysis, rather than pre-intervention analysis, is needed to effectively evaluate conservation outcomes, and that research on conservation strategies should pay attention to the role of the state, and the heterogeneity of local communities.

Nodes of resistance to green grabbing: a political ecology

Green grabbing is the privatization or appropriation of land for purposes of advancing a “green” economy while excluding local, indigenous people from natural resources. This is a problem of global scale that has arisen mainly during a historical period when free market, neo-liberal policies have dominated the world economy. The academic li-terature on the subject rarely mentions resistance to green grabbing, nor are there many efforts to critically and syste-matically examine the social dynamics of this process. We consider both what works and what fails during the process of opposition, as well as the social psychology of risk taking among both green grabbers and opponents. The paper con-cludes with a way forward proffering the resistance.

Nodes of resistance to green grabbing: a political ecology

Green grabbing is the privatization or appropriation of land for purposes of advancing a “green” economy while excluding local, indigenous people from natural resources. This is a problem of global scale that has arisen mainly during a historical period when free market, neo-liberal policies have dominated the world economy. The academic li-terature on the subject rarely mentions resistance to green grabbing, nor are there many efforts to critically and syste-matically examine the social dynamics of this process. We consider both what works and what fails during the process of opposition, as well as the social psychology of risk taking among both green grabbers and opponents. The paper con-cludes with a way forward proffering the resistance.

After the consent: Re-imagining participatory land governance in Massingir, Mozambique

Massingir district is located in southern Mozambique, bordering South Africa. From the mid-2000s onwards, foreign private and domestic investments in the district have been on the rise in the agribusiness, tourism, and conservation sectors. This has resulted in events that scholars and activists have come to describe as land, water, and green grabs. The on-going discussions have urged the government to fully implement the policy and legal frameworks that oblige investors to undertake community consultations based on the principle of Free and Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) and to safeguard the communities’ land right acquisition. However, little has been clarified about how the consulted communities actually have experienced the consequences of their consent after they agreed to resettle or to concede parts of their communally managed land to investors. This article elaborates on a case study of a community resettled from the Limpopo National Park in Massingir and the neighboring community, which, after struggling to secure land and to improve their livelihood, began to reflect on their initial consent, interact with various actors, and craft strategies for expressing dissent and re-negotiating the deal they had struck. The article argues that the current emphasis on consultation for the purposes of building consent overlooks the importance of paying systemic attention to these strategies that are emerging from the community’s everyday experiences with the consequences of their act of giving consent. Inclusive land governance entails an institutional mechanism that closely responds to people’s experiences with policy practices.

Community forest concessionaires: resisting green grabs and producing political subjects in Guatemala

In 2005, Guatemalan community forest concessionaires achieved a remarkable legislative victory that reversed a green land grab in the Maya Biosphere. The fight over this space, the Mirador Basin, provides valuable contributions to analyses of global land grabs, grassroots politics and power relations underpinning environmental governance. First, the fight for the Mirador Basin illustrates how green land grabs create new natures, rather than simply enclosing existing green spaces. Second, it contributes to recent scholarship detailing land-grabbing practices of resistance, acquiescence and incorporation ‘from below’ by describing how Maya Biosphere community forest concessionaires were able to reverse a green grab. Lastly, I argue this successful reversal largely rests on the articulation and mobilization of a new rights-bearing subject – the forest concessionaire. Struggles for land in the Maya Biosphere illustrate that practices and relations of green governance do not always create disciplined, neo-liberal, green subjects. Rather, community forestry has provided a political platform turning reserve residents into influential actors participating in the re-territorialization of power in contemporary Guatemala.

Conflicts, security and marginalisation: institutional change of the pastoral commons in a 'glocal' world.

This paper argues that pastoral commons are under increasing pressure not just from overuse by pastoralists themselves, but from land management policies. Since colonial times, these have been based on a persistent misconception of the nature of pastoral economies and combined with increasing land alienation and fragmentation through government policies and covert privatisation of pastures. The paper focuses especially on pastoral populations in African drylands and is based on long-term research by independent researchers summarising some of their experiences in western, eastern and southern Africa. Most of them are organised in the African Drylands Dialogue, trying to shed some light on the developments in these areas. Before discussing the actual situation of African pastoralists, the authors focus on basic institutional features of the political and economic management of common grazing lands. This is followed by an overview of land alienation processes in colonial times, which serves as a basis for understanding the current land alienation constellations. The paper then moves on to explain how and why pastoralists are framed by the national discourses as the 'other' and the 'troublemaker', even being labelled as terrorists in nation state contexts. This goes hand in hand with a new wave of land alienation in the form of large-scale land acquisitions or 'land grabbing' (including water grabbing and 'green grabbing' processes). The paper then outlines different coping and adaptation strategies adopted by pastoral groups in a context in which a range of different global and local political, economic and ecological situations interrelate ('glocal'). Finally, the paper discusses the way in which pastoralism could be reframed in a participatory way in the future.

Indigenous land claims or green grabs? Inclusions and exclusions within forest carbon politics in Indonesia

In this paper we outline the new political conjuncture in forest governance emerging in Indonesia and trace how it is influencing the land claim strategies of an Indigenous community in Central Kalimantan. The new political conjuncture is comprised on three inter-related elements: a Constitutional Court decision to recognise Indigenous land claims; the development of the Reducing Emissions from Forest Degradation and Deforestation Plus (REDD+) forest carbon programme; and a national initiative known as One-map. Drawing on concepts of governmentality, assemblage and territoriality we trace how the Indigenous People’s Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN) are using this moment to assemble a land claim in Bahanei. We find that the conjuncture is providing opportunities for Indigenous communities to engage with a new assemblage of interests normally associated with green grabs to claim land back from state and private interests. However, the romantic green Indigenous subjectivities the new political conjuncture requires to attract carbon investment rarely fit the heterogeneous make up of village life. This is leading to intimate exclusions based on ethnicity and class, raising troubling questions about the extent of overlap between land claims and green grabs.

Re-mining the collections: From bioprospecting to biodiversity offsetting in Madagascar

Madagascar has always held a special place on the bioprospecting map. Designated as one of the world’s “hottest” biodiversity hotspots, scientists believe the extremely high flora and faunal endemism contain unique potential for the commercialisation of natural products. Years of collections by bioprospectors in Madagascar are beginning to pay off, not necessarily from drug discovery, but through the biodata from their botanical collections. In the paper, we highlight the links between labour and value over time to illustrate the historical process of collecting inventories of biodata and calculating biodiversity metrics. As we demonstrate, biodata originally used for the purposes of drug discovery and scientific exploration are now being repurposed in biodiversity offsetting programs for multinational mining operations in Madagascar. This project of “re-mining” biodata has reinforced the power of select research institutions which now service their expertise for biodiversity offsetting initiatives. In sum, botanical agencies are far from apolitical actors in these new iterations of market-conservation but active participants in a new age of green grabbing.

Integrating Green Fiscal Reforms into the Agricultural Transformation Agenda: Panacea for Boosting Soil Enrichment and Water Conservation for Sustainable Food Production in Nigeria

Nigeria had a booming agricultural industry and prominent world market shares in many of its commodities at independence. With the continuous decline in these, the Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) has been floated to promote twelve commodities in production along their value chains. Various innovations and expected benefits feature in the programme. The cultivation methods and other activities within the nodes of the value chains do not however specify green growth strategy promoted by green fiscal reform policies. This implies the shortchanging of green growth strategy in the national development process and so the compromising of sustainability. This paper valued the environmental services loss resulting from deforestation associated with “slash and burn” arable crop expansion and the benefits of “green grabbing” - the deliberate appropriation of nature in the ATA. The profitability of food crop production with and without green fiscal reform policies integration was also assessed. Sampling procedures that included the stratified, simple random and purposive sampling were used at various stages depending on the objective. Primary data were collected through structured questionnaire. The analytical tools adopted were the Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) of the referendum type, on-day site travel cost method and the budgetary analysis. Results showed that 66.37% forest land use changes occurred in a seven year periods for arable food crops expansion. The environmental services loss as depicted by the Willingness To Pay (WTP) was averagely N0.60billion/year. The stock recreation value derived from “green grabbing” for the same period with 5% of the Nigerian population of 150 million visiting the Obudu Mountain Resort (OMR) for recreational purposes considered was N4.41 x 1012 million. The recreation use benefits of the OMR based on the Marshalian consumer surplus computation was slightly higher for the same period. Profitability in food crop production without green fiscal reforms was higher as compared to when it was considered. This will encourage the food crop farmers to engage in actions that are inimical to environmental sustainability in the ATA. Sustainability of farming livelihood is therefore more likely to be ensured with green fiscal reform policy instruments integrated into the ATA. The ATA therefore cannot be sustainable under the current “business as usual” practice of “slash and burn” agriculture. The need to integrate green fiscal reform policies into the agenda therefore is urgent. Keywords: Sustainability, deforestation, green growth, value chain analysis, green fiscal reform, Willingness To Pay, Marshalian consumer surplus.

Networked, rooted and territorial: green grabbing and resistance in Chiapas

Land grabbing has been characterized by large-scale commercial land deals or green grabs of large conservation tracts. In Chiapas, Mexico, green grabs employ a networked strategy across state, corporate and civil society lines to evict peasant and indigenous communities, and facilitate entry of extractive industries, plantations and industrial ‘ecotourism’. The resistance is rooted in place(s) and in a coalition of civil society organizations and autonomous communities. Network illustrations and field reports show that several environmental organizations occupy pivotal positions in grabbing and/or resistance networks, with large powerful groups linked to state and corporate interests. The experience in Agua Azul, a key node in a planned tourism megaproject, illustrates the deployment of networked and dispersed power to unmake and remake territories across scales. Small purchased plots form nodes in far-flung circuits of ecotourism and archeological sites. The substantial resistance is likewise rhizomatic in character, reaching across archipelagos of forest and farming communities and distant allies, to reconstitute autonomous territories. Ongoing land struggles play out in networked spaces, with entire territories, and many lives, at stake. Emerging coalitions of human rights, indigenous, religious and environmental groups promise an expanding resistance to evictions and territorial green grabs in Chiapas and elsewhere.

“Green grabbing,” pastoralism and environmental dynamics in Northern Kenya. An assessment of conservation models and practices in Marsabit County

In Northern Kenya, the history of protected areas reflects the debates that have shaped the world of conservation and environmental concerns. For a long time colonial assumptions about pastoralist uses of natural resources have been part of environmental policies and legitimized appropriation of nature. How does the implementation of natural resources management projects interact with pastoralists’ natural heritage and their future economies in the context of socio-ecological transition? This paper questions the relations between conservation practices and the regional environmental dynamics of five protected areas in the broader Chalbi desert. It describes models ranging from conservationist models used for large areas to more recent experiments and socio-technical choices implemented on smaller scale-fenced parcels. Through two central water places located in North Horr and Kalacha, we also describe the impacts of natural protected areas on pastoralist livelihood in the Chalbi desert. This situation, therefore, prompts for suggestions to discuss the split between environmental conservation and development and to better integrate research on socio-ecological dynamics in environmental policies.