Global land deals: What has been done, what has changed, and what’s next?

Abstract

In 2010, the Land Deals Politics Initiative formed to study the rising number of large-scale land deals taking place around the world. As the so-called ‘global land grab’ took shape, we organised small grant competitions to generate more empirical research into the phenomenon, and we organised conferences to debate the parameters and dynamics from the local level to the global. In this article, we take stock of what has been written about land grabbing as well as the way in which the context has changed since 2010. We highlight the ongoing need for research, as well as the changing nature of financial capital, the institutional “reforms” that resulted from calls for change, new technologies that have emerged to measure and distribute land access, the role of climate change in underpinning powerful new green grabs, and the changing geopolitical context that challenges resistance even as people struggle to retain their access to land. Finally, in the lead up to the 2024 Conference on Global Land Grabbing in Bogotá, Colombia, we highlight several challenges for the next decade of research on global land grabbing.