8: Resource ‘grabs’, investment and territory in pastoral areas

Course home

In recent decades, pastoral areas have been the focus of an investment push by governments, foreign powers and other large multinational capital through infrastructure corridors, high value extractive resources, including oil and minerals, as well as land that is valued for its potential to be converted into other uses including agricultural commercialisation, conservation and green energy developments. These projects are associated with plans to modernise, transform and develop places seen as ‘backward’.

In this lecture, Jeremy Lind explores the issues around these projects. There is often a benign view of such investments, linked to promotion of commercialisation and growth. But debates on land and resource ‘grabs’ tell a different story of elite capture and dispossession. Yet, in many cases, high modernist visions have not materialised in the ways imagined and not all investments have involved dispossession. Rather, the fate of pastoralists rests on the terms of their incorporation in deals – something requiring attention to multiple coinciding processes relating to labour, technology, expertise, markets, as well as land.

Large-scale investments have far-reaching consequences, including new territorialisations, contestations and struggles, and enrichment of local elites, raising important questions about who benefits and who loses out, and whether such large-scale projects do indeed deliver poverty-reducing development, as is claimed.

Watch the lecture

 

Questions

Thinking about the pastoral areas you know best:

• What do investments look like in these places and who frames their meaning?
• How are investments generating wider impacts, and who loses and wins?
• What types of resistance, mobilisation, subversion and forms of ‘contentious politics’ are evident around these processes?

Readings

• Borras, S.M., Hall, R., Scoones, I., White, B., and Wolford, W. (2011) Towards a better understanding of global land grabbing: an editorial introduction. Journal of Peasant Studies, 38(2): 209-216.
• Cormack, Z. and Kurewa, A. (2018) The changing value of land in Northern Kenya: the case of Lake Turkana Wind Power, Critical African Studies 10(1): 89-107.
• Côte, M. and Korf, B. (2018) Making concessions: Extractive enclaves, entangled capitalism and regulative pluralism at the gold mining frontier in Burkina Faso, World Development 101: 466-476.
• Fairhead, J., Leach, M., and Scoones, I. (2012) Green Grabbing: a new appropriation of nature? Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(2): 237-261.
• Ferguson, J. (2005) ‘Seeing like an oil company: space, security, and global capital in neoliberal Africa. American Anthropologist,107: 377-382
• Gebresenbet, F. (2016) ‘Land acquisitions, the politics of dispossession, and state-remaking in Gambella, Western Ethiopia.’ Africa Spectrum, 51(1): 5-28.
• Hagmann, T. and Peclard, D. (2010) Negotiating Statehood: Dynamics of Power and Domination in Africa. Development and Change, 41(4): 539–62.
• Hagmann, T. and Stepputat, F. (2016) Corridors of Trade and Power: Economy and State Formation in Somali East Africa, DIIS Working Paper 2016:8. Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies.
• Li, T. M. (2014) What is land? Assembling a resource for global investment. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 39: 589–602.
• Lind, J. (2017) Governing Black Gold: lessons from oil finds in Turkana, Kenya. IDS and Saferworld Research Briefing. See also the related digital story.
• Lind, J., Okenwa, D. and Scoones, I. (eds.) (2020) Land, Investment and Politics: Reconfiguring Eastern Africa’s Pastoral Drylands. Woodbridge: James Currey (Chapter 1 – open access (PDF) / Full text – available to purchase)
• Mosley, J. and Watson, E.E., (2016) Frontier transformations: development visions, spaces and processes in Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia. Journal of Eastern African Studies, 10(3): 452-475
• Rasmussen, M.B. and Lund, C. (2018) Reconfiguring frontier spaces: The territorialization of resource control. World Development, 101: 388-399.
• Regassa, A., Hizekiel, Y. and Korf, B. (2018) ‘Civilizing’ the pastoral frontier: land grabbing, dispossession and coercive agrarian development in Ethiopia. Journal of Peasant Studies: 1-21.
• Scott, J.C. (1998) Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• White, B., Borras Jr, S.M., Hall, R., Scoones, I. and Wolford, W., (2012) The new enclosures: critical perspectives on corporate land deals. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(3-4): 619-647.
• Wolford, W., Borras Jr, S.M., Hall, R., Scoones, I. and White, B. (2013) Governing global land deals: The role of the state in the rush for land. Development and Change, 44(2): 189-210.

Photo credit: Jeremy Lind

← Part 7 Course home Part 9 →