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Land Acquisitions, Well-being, and Environment

Feature-in-Progress

Guest Editors: Ariane de Bremond, Daniel G. Brown, Arun Agrawal, Jane Southworth
In the past decade, an explosion of research on land grabbing and land transactions has reinvigorated scholarly interest in land tenure, land use, human and ecosystem well-being, and their relationships. Analyses of these relationships recall long-standing scholarly debates on agricultural transformations. in so doing, they are also inevitably concerned with questions about institutional and technological changes, spillovers in agricultural systems, power and economic development, gender and labor relationships, and productivity growth and inequalities. In addressing these questions, they contribute to ongoing debates in land system science around land sparing, telecoupled and rural-urban interactions, and food, energy, and water security. As large socioeconomic and remote sensing-based datasets have become more widely available, novel analytical techniques and a strong focus on causal inference have allowed studies of large-scale land acquisitions )LSLAs) to generate new insights into the mechanisms of agricultural transitions. This special feature includes new research analyses on contemporary processes of agricultural change, land-system change, and structural transformation.

Research

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