Parties to land deals extend beyond primary lessors and lessees, and may involve private companies, national governments, regulatory institutions, financiers, non-governmental organisations, and local communities, among others. The papers in this panel explore multiple laws, treaties, codes, agreements, standards and regulations which frame land deals, including conservation-based protocols which now help incentivize land acquisitions for the carbon trading industry.
Country cases derive from Asia and Africa, where public lands, often in practice held under local forms of tenure, are widely subject to leasing and where processes of privatisation and titling are underway. The papers demonstrate the powerful role of legal instruments in the land rush, the dangers of weakly or unfairly structured domestic legislation, and the way in which the law is being used to legitimize, or curb, concentration of control over large territories. The significance of global and national legal pluralism in the context of rising competition for land is also highlighted.
Chair: Liz Alden Wily
- Adeline Carrier, CNRS, Paris, Economic Land Concessions: a Legal Framework to Legitimize Land Grabbing in Cambodia (Presentation)
- Lorenzo Cotula, International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), Legal frameworks for land deals in Africa: A political economy approach (Presentation)
- Kyla Tienhaara, Australian National University and Wynet Smith, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Negotiating Carbon Concessions in Developing Countries: Issues of Capacity, Confidentiality & Corruption (Presentation)
- Mahnaz Malik, International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), Foreign investment into agriculture: Investment Treaties and the ability of governments to balance rights and obligations between foreign investors and local communities (Presentation)