Exploring Governance Regimes through Agricultural Land Grabbing Dynamics

Land rights are human rights which are fundamental for achieving sustainable development. In a context of rapid environmental changes and shrinking democracies across the world, agricultural land grabbing requires renewed discussions as new actors, as well as new instruments for possessing, expropriating, and challenging previous land controls emerge.

In this three-year project, I investigated to what extent agricultural land grabbing processes affecting rural areas are inserted in broader governance struggles over power relations and identities. I engaged with questions concerning the relationship between State-making and land grabbing from a comparative North-South angle (Hungary/Nicaragua), an interdisciplinary standpoint (bridging feminist political ecology and scholarship on governance), a transdisciplinary perspective (with an action-research component), and with a focus on an understudied sector in the debate: agricultural areas in countries in political transition.

My research aimed to:

• analyse the extent to which State-making is influencing transformations in national land tenure systems;
• understand the effects of recent land politics, particularly on those farmers that are marginalised;
• explore how sustainable land politics can be envisioned in contexts of deep political transitions.

The data collection included interviews, participatory mapping, citizen science data collection, and social network analysis.