Can the Wrongs be Righted? Prospects for Remedy in the Philippine Oil Palm Agro‐industry

State‐based and corporate remedies are increasingly offered as solutions to intractable issues provoked by land‐based investments, such as the oil palm agro‐industry. This article critiques this shift towards procedural governance fixes, drawing on theories of the legitimizing function of corporate responsibility and mechanisms of elite capture in agrarian states. The authors contrast the ambition of remedy with local reality in one controversial oil palm project in Palawan Province, the Philippines, showing that it was operated by companies, banks, agencies and politicians who either lacked the capacity to rein in the project once it became evident that it was causing harm to farmers, or showed no interest in doing so. As one of the first detailed examinations of the growing oil palm sector in the Philippines, the study adds to understandings of the shifting nature of elite capture through transnational agro‐industry. It also shows that the remedies discourse remains rooted in colonial doctrines and neoliberal constructs and thus tends to deflect attention away from more appropriate harm prevention strategies. The authors argue that functional remedies will only arise once states and companies confront competing land and resource claims and relinquish more control over new procedures to local and indigenous communities.     

Declining Food Security in a Philippine Oil Palm Frontier: The Changing Role of Cooperatives

The long‐held redistributive function of agricultural cooperatives — one of moral economy and poverty alleviation — has changed dramatically as they emerge as core brokers for agro‐industrial development in the so‐called ‘green economy’. This article examines the changing role of cooperatives involved in brokering oil palm production and its impact upon the food security and livelihoods of smallholders who labour in plantation regimes situated in historically uneven agrarian political economies. Findings show how, increasingly, cooperatives reinforce uneven agrarian social relations of production and exchange in which indigenous smallholders experience loss of land, poor wage labour conditions tinged with insecurity and prejudice, and mounting debt in an expanding oil palm complex. The article suggests that these changes in agrarian social relations negatively influence indigenous farmers’ food security pathways, with their access to and use of appropriate foods diminishing. It asserts that understanding the impacts of cooperatives on food security pathways requires a relational and situated analysis of livelihood change and agrarian relations in extractive frontiers.     

Multilevel (mis)governance of palm oil production

The palm oil industry exemplifies the ‘regionalisation without regionalism’ pattern seen in other industries in Asia: extensive, regionally concentrated transnational economic integration accompanied by a low level of formal regional institution-building. Production is concentrated in Malaysia and Indonesia, and Asian countries account for a major share of the market for intermediate products. The ownership structure of palm oil production reflects the dominance of transnational Malaysian and Singaporean firms. There is no authoritative regional institution governing production, investment standards or labour in the industry. A patchwork of both enabling and regulatory governance institutions supports the industry. These are formal and informal, public and private, and are situated at multiple levels: within, below and across the nation state. Although the governance structure surrounding the palm oil industry has supported it well in terms of production volumes and profits, large externalities—environmental and social costs—persist. This article argues that the governance failures associated with the industry stem from different stakeholders' competing interests in contexts of highly unequal wealth and power distribution. Misgovernance is not an unintended consequence of institutions failing to keep up with markets in scale and scope, but is embedded in the multilevel governance regime that supports, and partially regulates, the industry.     

Unpacking Land Grabs: Subjects,Performances and the State in Ghana's ‘Small‐scale’ Gold Mining Sector

During the 2008 global financial crisis, gold‐backed reserves became a ‘safe haven’ for capital investment, causing gold prices to hit historic highs. Globally, small‐scale gold mining activities proliferated as prices climbed. Along the banks of Ghana's Offin River, abandoned, waterlogged mining pits now stretch for kilometres where agricultural and other land uses recently existed. While small‐scale mining is a right reserved for Ghanaian citizens, many mining sites are foreign‐operated and almost all go unremediated. There is thus a stark tension between Ghanaian minerals laws and environmental regulations and the ongoing transformation of rural landscapes. Based on 112 interviews and long‐term observation in Ghana since 2010, this article untangles the relationships and practices mediating ‘illegal’ foreign mining operations. Shifting subjectivities, performances and practices bring land grabbing into being as state actors weave together legal and extra‐legal domains to facilitate, and profit from, foreign mining. Other officials experience fear and frustration in the face of powerful mining interests, demonstrating the complex workings and conflicts between government actors and agencies. Detailing co‐productions between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ domains in official licensing procedures complicates understandings of the state and its role in foreign land grabbing, breaking down the ontological binaries — rational/irrational, official/unofficial — used to uphold an image of state legitimacy and cohesion. Finally, given the spatial extent of small‐scale mining deals and ensuing social and environmental transformations, the authors urge land‐grab scholars not to dismiss the importance of small‐scale deals alongside larger transactions.     

Vulnerability,Control and Oil Palm in Sarawak: Globalization and a New Era?

In the post logging era, Sarawak is being restructured to make way for large‐scale oil palm plantations. In this restructuring, the vulnerabilities of particular areas are being used in a wider battle to control production, particularly for export. Native customary lands, considered ‘unproductive’ or ‘idle’ by officials, are the target of oil palm plantation development under a new land development programme called Konsep Baru (New Concept). This article looks at the contradictions generated by the complex process of laying claims to ‘idle’ native customary land and focuses on Dayak organizing initiatives in northern Sarawak, Malaysia.     

‘The Law is to Blame’: The Vulnerable Status of Common Property Rights in Sub‐Saharan Africa

The context of this article is the surge in large‐scale land acquisitions of African lands by local and foreign investors for commercial food, livestock, oil palm and carbon trading purposes. Involuntary loss of rural lands at scale is not new to Africa's majority rural poor, nor is it driven by a single factor. Historically inequitable land relations within communities, compounded by a century of capitalist transformation, take their toll. This study argues, however, that the weak legal status of communal rights is the most pernicious enabler in their demise, allowing governments to take undue liberties with their citizens’ lands, and particularly those which are unfarmed and by tradition held in common. While international acquiescence to abusive domestic law helps entrench the diminishment of majority land rights, the domestic laws themselves are principally at fault and necessarily the target for change. This legal vulnerability is explored here through an examination of more than twenty African land laws.     

‘We Live Like This’: Local Inequalities and Disproportionate Risk in the Context of Extractive Development and Climate Change on New Hanover Island,Papua New Guinea

This study examines the local processes, effects, and responses to large‐scale logging and agricultural development efforts in subsistence communities on New Hanover Island, Papua New Guinea (PNG). Recently, New Hanover became the site of three special agricultural and business leases (SABLs) that combined to cover approximately 79% of the island. The proliferation of SABLs within PNG is an outcome of recent national development initiatives promoting a significant increase in the production of commercial agricultural crops such as oil palm and biofuel. Accordingly, SABLs are designed to facilitate the development of long‐term commercial agricultural industries in rural locations across the country through the conversion of forested lands and the simplification of communal land tenure, for the purposes of private lease. However, SABLs have simultaneously provided a convenient loophole around more restrictive national forestry policies and thereby become attractive to traditional logging interests in the Asian/Pacific region. Consequently, many SABLs across PNG have failed to produce viable agricultural development or broad local benefit. It is within this context, that this study pays particular attention to the experiences of women and lower‐status landowners living through the processes of SABL conversion, during the El Nino drought of 2015. The study details the statuses and roles of these groups within the overall development process, the ways in which their social relationships changed in the context of development, why these groups were particularly vulnerable to the broad livelihood effects of forest conversion and drought, how they adapted to these effects, and what their hopes were regarding the future of the development project and life on the island. This study adds to current theoretical interests on emerging neoliberal frontiers of land and resource control by examining these SABL landscapes on New Hanover as contemporary examples of land grabs and documenting the very real local level consequences of this phenomenon. The study is also particularly significant in light of the growing threats to forests and forest‐dependent livelihoods and the recognition of the importance of local forest practices to global sustainability.     

Cadastral Politics: The Making of Community‐Based Resource Management in Zimbabwe and Mozambique

Projects promoting community‐based management of natural resources frequently encourage local smallholders to share flora, fauna, or land forms with state agencies and/or private companies. Ideals of common property and moral economy have inspired this agenda and helped spread it globally. In Southern Africa, however, the general model of shared landscapes has collided with a bitter history of white colonization and land grabbing. This article recounts the rise and fall of one CAMPFIRE (Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources) project in eastern Zimbabwe. There, cadastral politics — struggles over the bounding and control of land — overwhelmed negotiations for joint management and eco‐tourism. Across the border, in Mozambique, community‐based resource management has engaged with cadastral politics in a more fruitful fashion. In the midst of latter‐day Afrikaner colonization, this project mapped smallholders’ claims to land. Thus, the Zimbabwean project ignored territorial conflict and ultimately succumbed to it. The Mozambican project jumped into the fray, with some success. On past or current settler frontiers, community‐based management may learn from this lesson: dispense with an ideology of sharing and join the rough‐and‐tumble of cadastral politics.     

Relational Economies,Social Embeddedness and Valuing Labour in Agrarian Change: An Example from the Developing World

A relatively neglected area of research on agrarian and economic change is the role of indigenous concepts of labour value in the transition from subsistence to market production. In West New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea, the presence of a migrant population on an oil palm land settlement scheme (LSS) in close proximity to village‐based oil palm growers, provided an opportunity to examine changing notions of labour value through the lens of smallholder productivity. Voluntary settlers on the LSS are experiencing population pressure and are highly dependent on oil palm for their livelihoods. In contrast, customary landowners in village settings produce oil palm in a situation of relative land abundance. By examining differences in how these two groups practise and value commodity production, the paper makes four key points. First, concepts of labour value are not static and involve struggles over how labour value is defined. Second, the transition to market‐based notions of labour value can undermine labour's social value with a consequent weakening of social relationships within and between families. Third, Theories of Value developed in western contexts and used to frame development policies and projects in the developing world are often inappropriate and even harmful to the welfare of communities that have different registers of value. Fourth, in response to Point 3, and following Rigg (2007), there is a need for ‘theorising upwards’ using empirical data from the developing world to inform theory rather than applying to the developing world models of sociality and economy developed in western contexts.     

Oil and the House of Saud: Analysis of Saudi Arabian Oil Policy

This article analyzes the process of how the Government of Saudi Arabia determines oil policy. It focuses on oil production because it accepts that the Saudis are “price takers” rather than “price setters.” It applies economic and political explanations as determinants of how much oil is produced. Two periods of Saudi oil policy are compared—1987–1991 and 1997–2001—using open‐source data from various newspapers and newsletters. The article concludes that oil production in Saudi Arabia is, in large measure, a function of Saudi Arabian estimates of how its oil reserves may provide long‐term revenue and political stability at the risk of short‐term economic gains.     

Financing the 450 Year Road: Land Expropriation and Politics ‘All the Way Down’ in Vientiane,Laos

Over the past decade, the Lao government has developed the policy of ‘Turning Land into Capital’ (TLIC), a strategy for generating revenue and economic value from ‘state land’. The 450 Year Road Project built along the periphery of the Laotian capital, Vientiane, linking the national highway with the Thai border, was financed using a TLIC model. Additional land to the side of the road was acquired to be resold at rates significantly higher than the compensation provided to landowners. Prior to construction, however, most of the land had already been purchased by external buyers, who impeded the project's development by refusing to concede their newly purchased plots. This article contributes to the literature on political reactions ‘from below’ to land grabbing by arguing that in order to understand the operational success or failure of land development projects, it is imperative to analyse the politics that pervade such investments ‘all the way down’ — the interrelated roles, interests and relations of involved actors and groups in all positions of power within society. The 450 Year Road project stalled due to its failure to take into account the interests and politics of seemingly compliant actors, particularly landowning farm households and speculative land buyers.     

Climate injustice,criminalisation of land protection and anti-colonial solidarity: Courtroom ethnography in an age of fossil fuel violence

As plans for expanding fossil fuel infrastructure continue to ramp up despite threats to the planet, how are geographers to address the criminalisation and prosecution of peaceful acts of defending earth, water and land? Reflecting on a courtroom ethnography and debates spanning legal geography, political ecology and social movements studies, this article explores embodied struggles around oil, ‘justice’ and geographies of caring – discussing how Indigenous youth, grandmothers in their eighties and others were convicted of ‘criminal contempt’ for being on a road near an oil pipeline expansion project. The project (“Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion”) was created to transport unprecedented levels of heavy oil (bitumen) across hundreds of kilometres of Indigenous peoples' territory that was never ceded to settler-colonial authorities in Canada. Focusing on a controversial injunction designed to protect oil industry expansion, the discussion explores the performativity of a judge's exercise of power, including in denying the necessity to act defence, side-lining Indigenous jurisdiction, and escalating prison sentences. Courtroom ethnography offers a unique vantage point for witnessing power at work and vast resources used by state actors to suppress issues fundamental to the United Nations Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Paris Climate Accord. It also provides a lens into the intersectional solidarity and ethics of care among those who dare to challenge colonialism and hyper-extractivism, inviting engagement with multiple meanings of ‘irreparable harm’ at various scales. The article calls for more attention to power relations, values and affects shaping courtroom dynamics in an age in which fossil fuel interests, climate crisis and settler-colonial control over courts are entwined in evermore-complex violent entanglements.     

Developing Exclusion: The Case of the 1961 Land Reform in Colombia

The modern project of rural development has been seen as one of increasing incorporation, control and rationalization of territory by the state. Evidence from the formulation of the Colombian land reform policy of 1961 gives more nuance to this general conceptualization. Those places where the state intervened through large‐scale resettlement programmes conceived within the framework of Cold War development are the same places where war and the drug economy — the most serious threats to the state itself — took root and grew. This article examines this contradiction. It interrogates the idea of modern development as a project that necessarily brings subjects and territories into the realm of state control. It also attempts to provide a counterweight to arguments about the territorialization of the war in Colombia being the outcome of state inaction and lack of development.     

Disequilibrium in Development Finance: The Contested Politics of Institutional Accountability and Transparency at the World Bank Inspection Panel

This article examines the dynamic nature with which independent accountability mechanisms operate. Focusing on the World Bank, the authors argue that its Inspection Panel evolves according to internal and external pressures. In seeking to achieve equilibrium, and protect its authority and independence, the Panel has gone through several distinct phases: negotiation, emergence, protracted resistance, assertion of independence and authority, renewed tension, and contestation. The core novelty of the article is its application of concepts from outside the field of development studies — notably institutional accountability from the governance literature, and judicialization from the legal studies literature — to the topic of the Inspection Panel. Examining the Panel in this way demonstrates that accountability mechanisms represent a hybrid of transnational governance influenced by a range of actors including project‐affected peoples, national governments, managers and development donors. Accountability in development finance is about competing interests as well as competing conceptions and expectations of accountability. In such a complex and multi‐scalar system, the Panel is not only concerned with delivering well‐researched investigation reports; it is also an entity seeking to ensure its own survival, as well as an arbiter of its own brand of legitimacy and accountability.     

People in Between: Conversion and Conservation of Forest Lands in Thailand

The analysis of ‘ambiguous lands’ and the people who inhabit them is most revealing for understanding environmental deterioration in Thailand. ‘Ambiguous lands’ are those which are legally owned by the state, but are used and cultivated by local people. Land with an ambiguous property status attracts many different actors: villagers hungry for unoccupied arable lands in the frontiers; government departments looking for new project sites; and conservation agencies searching for new areas to be protected. This article shows, first, how two types of ambiguous land — state‐owned but privately‐cultivated land, and communal lands — were created. It then examines how the Karen, one of the hill peoples living on the ambiguous lands, have been struggling to survive between the forces of capitalistic development and forest conservation. Using a detailed study of forest use and dependency conducted in two Karen villages, I argue that the state’s efforts to reduce the Karen’s forest dependency, or even to evict them from the forests, are not leading to the stated objective of conservation. Finally, I draw some wider implications with reference to James Scott’s thesis on state simplification.     

Orphans’ Land Rights in Post‐War Rwanda: The Problem of Guardianship

In 1994, the Rwandan civil war and genocide produced thousands of orphans. Alongside the war, the growing HIV/AIDS crisis in Rwanda has produced a current population of about 300,000 orphans — many of whom are compelled to head households. These orphans urgently require land use rights, but many find that their rights to their deceased parents’ customary land holdings are denied or restricted by their guardians and others. Despite the legal protections for children that are guaranteed within Rwanda's laws, the reality is that many guardians do not respect orphans’ land rights and few orphans have sufficient access to administrative and legal forums to assert and defend these rights. In contrast to most accounts in the literature that discuss more generally the issue of African orphans’ land rights in the context of adults’ land rights, this article focuses on specific cases in which Rwandan orphans independently pursued their land rights. Ultimately, the article concludes that in Rwanda — and elsewhere in Africa — government officials should re‐examine their ideas about guardianship and grant orphans urgent attention as individuals and as a special interest group.     

Negotiating Green Space with Landed Interests: The Urban Political Ecology of Greenway in the Pearl River Delta,China

Land‐centred urbanisation has precipitated shortage of green space in Chinese cities. However, in the Pearl River Delta, an ambitious greenway system has recently managed to flourish. It is intriguing to ask how this has become possible. Informed by the perspective of urban political ecology, this paper finds that the greenway project in the Pearl River Delta represents a set of politically realistic endeavours to alleviate urban green space shortage by adapting to, rather than challenging, powerful landed interests. Three interlocking dimensions about land—municipal land quota, rural land use claims, and real estate development—have influenced why, where and how greenways have been created. Based on these findings, we argue that research on China's politics of urban sustainability necessarily needs to understand the country's land politics.     

From Force to Legitimation: Rethinking Land Grabs in Cambodia

This article moves beyond a focus on the brute force involved in high‐profile land grabs to examine the way legitimation, regulation and coercion intersect in Cambodia's property regime. It builds on the ‘powers of exclusion’ framework developed by Hall, Hirsch and Li to argue that increased connections within civil society in Cambodia and engagement with Western commodity markets have motivated state and private concessionaires to use different means of land exclusion, with less outright force and a greater focus on repressive regulation and legitimation. These exclusionary powers work through informal political connections, secrecy and obfuscation, which the authors term the ‘power of informality’. This argument is substantiated with two case studies that illustrate a move away from the dominant narrative of forceful expulsion of land users in Economic Land Concessions (ELC) towards approaches that provide in‐kind compensation and carve out land for smallholders: a recent land titling campaign in ELC areas, and the first oil palm ELC to gain responsible investment certification. While the authors remain cautious of the implications of this shift, given the persistence of the power of informality, these cases illustrate the potential for new forms of state–society relations: a shift from fear of authorities to a demand for greater accountability and responsiveness.     

Post‐Conflict Ambon: Forced Migration and the Ethno‐Territorial Effects of Customary Tenure

In post‐conflict contexts characterized by large‐scale migration and increasing levels of legal pluralism, customary land tenure risks being deployed as a tool of ethno‐territorialization in which displaced communities are denied return and secure land rights. This thesis will be illustrated through a case study of the Indonesian island of Ambon where a recognition of customary tenure — also called adat — was initiated in 2005 at the end of a high‐intensity conflict between Christians and Muslims. Although a system of land tenure providing multiple forms of social security for the indigenous in‐group, adat in Ambon also constitutes an arena of power in which populations considered as non‐indigenous to a fixed historical territory are pushed into an inferior legal position. The legal registration of customary tenure therefore tends to be deployed to settle long‐standing land contests with a growing migrant community, hereby legally enforcing some of the forced expulsions that were brought about by the recent communal violence.     

How Capitalism Will Save Colonialism: The Privatization of Reserve Lands in Canada

This paper surveys the ways in which the First Nations Property Ownership Act (FNPOA) is the site of both tension and alliance between state, non‐state, and local Indigenous interests converging around a common agenda of land “modernization” in Canada. It is a convergence, I argue, that must be read in the context of a reorganization of society under neoliberalism. The FNPOA legislation is discursively framed to acknowledge Indigenous land rights while the bill simultaneously introduces contentious measures to individualize and municipalize the quasi‐communal land holding of reserves. The intersections of alliance around this land modernization project foreground the complex ways in which capitalism and colonialism, though inextricably tied, perform distinguishable economic processes, and how we must be attentive to the particulars of their co‐articulation with local formations of indigeneity.