Green Grabbing Research Articles

The social and ecological costs of reforestation. Territorialization and industrialization of land use accompany forest transitions in Southeast Asia

Five Southeast Asian countries (Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Philippines and Malaysia) have experienced forest transitions, that is, a shift from net deforestation to net increases in forest area, since the 1990s. Climate change mitigation policies such as REDD+ actively promote reforestation, especially in the Global South, where they have been accompanied by exclusionary effects, known as green grabbing. In a regional analysis, we highlight some of the political and biophysical dimensions that come along with forest transitions in the five Southeast Asian countries, interrogating these with respect to the spatial injustices they produce. We propose to read forest transitions as a combined process of separating and industrializing agriculture and forestry – at the expense of more integrated land use such as shifting cultivation. We use the concepts of state territorialization and socio-ecological transition to analyze the separation of agricultural and forest land, an eventual marginalization of shifting cultivation and an increasing use of fossil energy carriers (that enables the industrialization of land use and other economic activities). These complex processes attenuate and compromise acclaimed benefits of the forest transition for climate change mitigation.

Environmentality, green grabbing, and neoliberal conservation: The ambiguous role of ecotourism in the Green Life privatised nature reserve, Sumatra, Indonesia

Against the background of neoliberal conservation and green grabbing, this paper investigates an ecotourism initiative through the notion of ‘multiple environmentalities’ (neoliberal, disciplinary, sovereign and truth), which concerns the governance of people for environmental causes. We apply this to the inhabitants of Batu Katak, Sumatra, Indonesia, where the Green Life Project has been established next to Gunung Leuser National Park as a Private Protected Area. An important governance strategy for Green Life is the establishment of volunteer ecotourism to generate funds and to include the local community. We argue that ecotourism can play a crucial role in legitimising the activities and increasing the power of nature conservation organisations, which, in the case of Green Life, is visible in the growth of coercive means to secure protected areas. If ecotourism is the kernel of neoliberal environmentality at Green Life, the core issue is the prevalence of truth environmentality, in which nature is often valued higher than people. This valuation led to the strengthening of disciplinary and sovereign environmentality. Arguably, ecotourism at Green Life will not establish the intended sustainable relations with the community, and this paper functions as an important lesson for practitioners to scrutinise the consequences of their governance strategies.

Novel bio-inspired three-dimensional nanocomposites based on montmorillonite and chitosan

In this study, inspired by nacre-like structural natural shells, novel three-dimensional (3D) nanocomposites based on natural nanoplatelets of montmorillonite (MMT) and polysaccharide of chitosan (CS) were prepared with solution intercalation and self-assembly process. The CS-intercalated-MMT nanoplatelets units acted as “bricks” and CS molecules acted as “mortar”, arranging in fairly well-ordered layered structure. With addition of glutaraldehyde (GA) and Pd2+ cations, synergistic toughening and strengthening effects of covalent and ionic bonds could be achieved. The best mechanical properties of the prepared 3D nanocomposites were observed as 5.6 KJ/m2 (impact strength), 3.3 GPa (flexural modulus), and 65.8 MPa (flexural strength), respectively, which showed higher toughness but lower flexural properties than natural pearl mussel shells. Nevertheless, both the impact and flexural properties of the prepared 3D nanocomposite were much higher than the other natural shell, i.e. green grab shell. Besides conventional methods characterizations, the nacre-like structure of the artificial 3D nanocomposite was further evidenced with positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy characterizations. This work might facilitate a versatile platform for developing green 3D bionanocomposites with fairly good mechanical properties.

Community-Led Green Land Acquisition: Social Innovative Initiatives for Forest Protection and Regional Development

Land acquisition often involves power and displacement and can be carried out on a large scale. There are many forms of land acquisition, including for environmental and conservation purposes as well as for production activities. While green grabbing has joined land grabbing as an environmental justice issue of concern, it is not necessarily the case that all green land acquisition is large scale, done by powerful outsiders, or leads to displacement and exclusion. The outcomes of green land acquisition are dependent on the mechanisms used, the adequacy of resettlement and/or compensation, and the social and environmental context in which it happens. We discuss the outcomes of community-led land acquisition for conservation purposes in Costa Rica. We considered a special case of green land acquisition done by local civil society to defend the forest and water resources of the Juan Castro Blanco National Water Park in Costa Rica. We used the literature on green grabbing, social ecological systems, and social innovation to discuss local environmental governance and regional sustainable development. This paper makes a fresh contribution to environmental planning and environmental governance by bringing in aspects of green land acquisition that have not been previously explored.

Corrigendum to “Counter-conducts and the green grab: Forest peoples’ resistance to industrial resource extraction in the Saracá-Taquera National Forest, Brazilian Amazonia” [Global Environmental Change Volume 56, May 2019, 124–133](S0959378018311701)(10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2019.04.004)

The authors regret to inform readers that a correction was missed to be performed in the 4th para in the section titled “Rights claims as counter-conducts”. The sentence “They were only recognised as an identity category under the amorphous signifier “traditional populations” by Decree 6.040 in 2007.” had to be changed to “They were only recognised under the identity category “traditional communities” by Decree 6.040 in 2007.” The following sentence has been removed: “Their heterogeneous origins, including European, African and Native Amazonian heritages, from the perspective of states, governments and international law are impossible to fit into essentialised ‘indigenous’ or ‘tribal’ categories used in the ILO169 and the Brazilian Constitution of 1988 (Fraser, 2018).” The authors apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Institution Shopping and Resilience Grabbing: Changing Scapes and Grabbing Pastoral Commons in African Floodplain Wetlands

This article argues on the basis of a comparative study in floodplain areas in Cameroon, Tanzania, and Zambia that land tenure issues have to be related to historical institutional changes not only to property rights in land, but also to land related common pool resources. It further outlines that in addition to privatisation of resources, pastoralists face challenges from the fragmentation of cultural landscape ecosystems, which serves to undermine local common property institutions and their reciprocal resource management arrangements that provided resilience in floodplain ecosystems. Colonisation and postcolonial constellations led to a major institutional change from common to state property in African rangelands, and created legal and institutional pluralism which enabled more powerful state and wealthy actors to shop for institutions that suit them best, especially privatisation and open access constellations (Haller 2010). The article argues that it is this institutional change that transformed the previous cultural landscape ecosystems, that conservationists and governments now want to protect by excluding pastoralists. It will analyse how governments and environmentalists increase their bargaining power in order to appropriate these landscapes in the form of land as commons and green grabbing. It will do so by combining a New Institutionalism and Political Ecology approach (NIPE) with Appadurai's notion of scapes (1996) in a way that unpacks power dynamics for legitimacy-based governmentalities that link global and local scales. The article unpacks the idea of ideoscapes and adds a four-step historical phases model to the concept. This illustrates the scapes pastoralists are in (state, neoliberal, neoliberal applied including investment and conservation, and terrorism and control scapes). These scapes provide legitimacy capital for powerful actors, shape platforms for strategic selection of institutions (institution shopping) and act as Anti-Politics Machines (APM).

Transformations, Changes, and Continuities in Conservation Governance: A Case Study of Wildlife Conservation in Kenya, 1980–2016

Global conservation policy and governance has undergone significant changes since the publication of World Conservation Strategy: Living Resource Conservation for Sustainable Development. The strategy sought to integrate conservation and development deviating from the practice under fortress conservation, which considers the two concepts incompatible. What has this significant shift in approach meant for conservation governance at lower levels (i.e., national and sub-national) of governance? This article explores this question in the context of wildlife conservation in Kenya. The article is premised on field data collected in the country during the months of June, July, and August 2016 using mixed methods: key informant interview, household survey, and document review. It documents transformation, change, and continuity in conservation governance in Kenya during 1980–2016. The article also identifies three emerging concerns that hinder sustainable wildlife conservation in Kenya: elitism, green grabbing, and donor-dependency.

The sun and the scythe: energy dispossessions and the agrarian question of labor in solar parks

ABSTRACT Green grabbing is accelerating throughout the Global South to facilitate climate change mitigation. This paper illuminates the discursive and extra-economic means through which the state dispossesses agropastoralists of both land and energy to develop solar parks in semi-arid rural India. We advance the empirical and theoretical aspects of energy dispossessions, with implications for the agrarian question of labor. Using data obtained from mixed methods fieldwork, this research reestablishes the urgency of responding to the classical agrarian question in the context of low-carbon energy transitions.

Case GRAB

Grab is the leader of taxi transportation today in Southeast Asia, but how can it stay leader in the years to come? This paper is a research work about Grab company from past, present and future. From Grab creation in 2012 till today the company’s shape has changed a lot. Since the moment Grab bought Uber’s Southeast Asia operations, the ride-hailing app has always been first transport company in Malaysia and many other southern Asian countries. Grab success is mainly due to the fact that the company is always able to jump on to new market opportunities and always seeking for improvement. After telling more about Grab’s history and way of functioning, we focus on two main propositions of improvement: Rent-ACar, and Green Grab. This research works also as a guideline for Grab’s CEO on what to do in the future for his business to stay competitive.

“Prosperity for Everyone” in the Post-Conflict?: How Does Environmentally and Militarily Oriented State (Re)Control in the Ariari Region Propel Productive Segmentation and Social Fracturing?

Through perspectives on political ecology, this article aims to explain the paradoxical outcomes that global policies on state re-territorialization and promotion of green economies have had in the reconfiguration of the municipality of Puerto Rico (Ariari region, Colombian Amazonian Piedmont). On one hand, historically contested areas have experienced both relatively successful programs of peasant parceling, especially during the early 2000s, and more recently, active processes of deforestation and coca resurgence inside La Macarena National Natural Park. On the other, where the State has been able to secure a more militaristic presence, alliances between the State and agribusiness sectors have promoted land valuation and productive reconversion from coca to “clean, alternative and socio-environmentally responsible” oil palm plantations. Thus, a global agenda to accelerate the transition to a post-conflict scenario in the municipality of Puerto Rico has produced fracturing trajectories of peasant titling and green grabbing (and a sort of productive ghettoization) since the mid-2000s, radically transforming the socio-spatial landscape of this municipality.

Counter-conducts and the green grab: Forest peoples’ resistance to industrial resource extraction in the Saracá-Taquera National Forest, Brazilian Amazonia

This paper contributes to the theory of environmentality – the ‘conduct of conduct’ with regard to the environment – by incorporating Foucault’s notion of counter-conducts to elucidate the political subjectivities emergent from the performance of dissent in relation to different forms of power – sovereign, disciplinary and biopower – through which a spatialized rational-technical governmentality of ‘green’ mining and logging is enacted in Saracá-Taquera National Forest (FLONA), Brazilian Amazonia. We analyse the counter-conductive subjectivities emergent from forest peoples’ political articulation through identity categories riberinhos and quilombolas (enshrined in the 1988 Constitution and subsequent laws), claiming of rights to delimit areas of traditional use and ancestral territories, along with direct action, critical discourse and reassertion of agroecological knowledge against industrial resource extraction. To capture the dynamic relation of the conduct of conduct to counter-conducts we draw on a late Foucauldian model of a self, wherein his earlier focus on how the Panopticon shapes self-discipline is complemented by a turn to care for and ethics of the self - practices of freedom through which subjects have the potential to transcend self-discipline. We use this lens to illuminate two case-studies, one focusing on mining, the other on timber, exploring how in this protected area - which permits the ‘sustainable’ industrial extraction of natural resources - the state, companies and an NGO try to shape forest peoples as ‘green’ subjects. Counter-conducts provide the theory of environmentality with a broader perspective on resistance foregrounding the production of political subjectivities in dissent whilst breaking with the resistance-domination binary.

Grey areas in green grabbing: subtle and indirect interconnections between climate change politics and land grabs and their implications for research

This paper builds on the literature on green grabbing. It makes a fresh contribution by bringing in aspects of green grabbing that are less visible and obvious. These are subtle, fluid and indirect interconnections between climate change politics and land grabs. It is difficult to see these interconnections from an ‘either black or white’ perspective. It is likely that the extent of this ‘grey area’ intersection in terms of affected social relations, nature and land use change is quite significant globally, even when such interconnections tend to operate below the radar of dominant governance institutions and database tracking. This situation calls for more nuanced understanding of governance imperatives, and for constructing the necessary body of knowledge needed for appropriate political intervention. This paper offers preliminary ways in which such interconnections can be seen and understood, and their implications for research and politics explored. It concludes by way of a preliminary discussion of the notion of ‘agrarian climate justice’ as a possible framework for formal governance or political activism relevant to tackling such grey area interconnections.

Wind parks in post-crisis Greece: Neoliberalisation vis-à-vis green grabbing

This article explores the growth of wind parks in post-crisis Greece in the convergence of the Greek economic crisis, the country’s structural adjustment and global climate change. It illuminates an ongoing process of nature’s neoliberalisation defined by specific measures and strategies. These have facilitated a wave of green grabbing (public and private land, financial and natural resources) in Greece by mostly transnational (energy) companies. Green grabbing is leading to unfavourable consequences for local shepherds and farmers, domestic and small business electricity consumers, conservation and local biodiversity, as well as to ecological distribution conflicts. Private wind parks in post-crisis Greece serve as a socioecological fix to the Greek economic crisis and climate change. The article finally argues that large private and public-private wind parks are far from innocent. Rather, hiding under green and economic growth/recovery credentials, they represent a vehicle for the reproduction and expansion of capitalism with important socioecological implications varying in each context necessitating urgent empirical exploration.

From primitive accumulation to entangled accumulation: Decentring Marxist Theory of capitalist expansion

During the last few decades, the concept of primitive accumulation ( ursprüngliche Akkumulation) introduced by Karl Marx and expanded by Rosa Luxemburg has been revived and improved. Accordingly, scholars have used this framework not to characterize a past moment in the history of capitalism, but to grasp the continuous process of coupling and uncoupling geographical and social spheres in the capital accumulation in different fields: financialization, the care economy, green grabbing, the sharing economy, real estate bubbles, data mining, etc. Despite the quality and productivity of these debates, they are still focused on authors and phenomena observed in the Global North, ignoring a long tradition of similar discussions developed especially in Latin America. The article seeks to decentre these debates by taking seriously into account approaches which address primitive accumulation from the perspective of (post)colonial and (post)slave societies. It coins the concept entangled accumulation to emphasize the interdependencies between practices of exploitation and expropriation, wage and slave labour, state power and illegal violence, and capitalist and non-capitalist economies, which have shaped capital accumulation throughout history.

Urban Growth-Oriented Green Accumulation: Ecological Conservation Planning in the Shenzhen DaPeng Peninsula in Southern China.

Neoliberal conservation has recently become a topic of academic research and a method of practice within the context of globalization. Less attention has been given to how neoliberal conservation has been practiced at the urban scale. This paper draws on the concept of ‘urban-growth-oriented green grabbing’ to capture the multidimensionality of the reasoning and process of ecological conservation in an urban growth context. It focuses on two ecological spatial protection plans for the DaPeng Peninsula in the city of Shenzhen, China. Through empirical investigation, this article traces the political economy of these plans and draws out the insights they offer regarding theories of urban environmentalism. The empirical results show that the ecological conservation plans are best understood as ‘green grabbing’ that has been achieved by land transfer and spatial interest redistribution. Conceptually, the paper provides further evidence of the process of neoliberal conservation within the urban context.

Conservation and people’s livelihoods in Colombia

This paper seeks to focus on the way in which land transformation related to the grabbing process are directly involved in people’s livelihoods and life projects. We use the term territorial grabbing instead of green grabbing (or just land grabbing), because even though the case that we illustrate in our work can be describe as a green grab, we make a call for the necessity of a comprehensive analysis of the socio-spatial implications that polices such as the governmental environmental conservation agenda can implicate for individuals and communities in terms of impacts, influences, and [re]significations of their territories and territorialities. Therefore, our objective is to go beyond the discussion on the appropriation of land and resources for environmental purposes (and therefore the discussion of land dynamics in relation to globalization, foreign investment, markets liberalization, violence, and control) to bring also into the debate the diverse socio-spatial implications and meanings that create a geographical imagination capable of having profound influences on the way in which people and groups understand their place in the world.

Land grabbing within a protected area: The experience of local communities with conservation and forestry activities in Los Esteros del Iberá, Argentina

Protected areas are increasingly being created, managed and owned by private actors, resulting in land grabs that are often at the expense of local control, livelihoods and biodiversity. Changes in land ownership and land use lead to new governance arrangements, which are full of paradoxes, alter ownership responsibilities, and create clashes of perspectives over how nature should be valued and utilised. Conversely, the presence of new actors potentially also brings about socio-environmental awareness and can open-up arenas for dialogue and multi-level collaboration. Using qualitative research methods, we considered two case studies in the protected area, Los Esteros del Iberá, in the north-east of Argentina: the Harvard Management Company’s investments in industrial tree plantations; and the conservation project of Douglas Tompkins (i.e. the Conservation Land Trust). Their activities have increased the complexity of socio-political dynamics in the region, leading to contradictions and conflicts, as well as to a strengthened commitment to manage the Iberá region better. Nevertheless, local communities perceived little difference between green grabbing and land grabbing, with all land transfers increasing inequality.

Green grabs and rural development: How sustainable is biofuel production in post-war Sierra Leone?

In Sub-Saharan Africa, now dubbed the ‘Green OPEC’ of the global bioenergy economy, biofuels have been hailed as a ‘new profitability frontier’ that will provide ‘win-win’ outcomes and deliver development to poor communities. Yet, in an era of economic recession and soaring food prices, their ‘sustainability’ has been at the centre of controversy. This paper focuses on the case of Sierra Leone, where in 2008, a Swiss bioenergy company ushered in the largest foreign direct investment since the end of the country’s civil war. Although recently set back by the catastrophic impacts of the Ebola crisis, there continues to be much support for the government’s strategy to secure foreign direct investment in biofuels production in agriculturally rich regions of the country. Bioenergy proponents believe that such investments will transform rural areas, in light of the fact that Sierra Leone has over the last decade been consistently ranked as one of the poorest in the world, facing food insecurity, high unemployment and entrenched poverty. But land access and control remain central to debates around biofuels and development, particularly for poor rural people living in project areas. This paper explores the perceptions of a wide range of project stakeholders, many of whom have differing interpretations of what biofuel sustainability entails. The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications this may have for the present post-Ebola environment, where evolving policy discussions on land investment and ‘green’ development continue to assume a key part of the government’s recovery trajectory.

Forest plantations and climate change discourses: New powers of ‘green’ grabbing in Cambodia

Efforts to combat global climate change through forestry plantations designed to sequester carbon and promote sustainable development are on the rise. This paper analyses the trajectory of Cambodia´s first large-scale reforestation project awarded within the context of climate change mitigation. The 34,007 ha concession was formally conceived to promote sustainable resource use, livelihood improvements and emission reduction. On the ground, however, vast tracks of diverse forest landscapes are being cleared and converted to acacia monocultures, existing timber stocks are logged for market sale, and customary land users dispossessed from land and forest resources. While the project adds to an ongoing land grab crisis in Cambodia, we argue that the explicit environmental ends of the forestry concession enabled a ‘green grab’ that not only exceeds the scale of land grabs caused by conventional economic land concessions, but surprisingly also exacerbates forest logging and biodiversity loss in the area. This case demonstrates the extent to which current climate change discourses, forestry agendas and their underlying assumptions require critical revision in global policy discussions to forestall the growing problem of green grabbing in land use.

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.