Land in urban debates: Unpacking the grab–development dichotomy

Femke van Noorloos and Griet Steel (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) and Christien Klaufus (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) published in Urban Studies Volume 56 Issue 5 (April 2019)

Abstract

On the heels of the rural ‘land grab’ debate, the ongoing urban transition combined with large-scale urban infrastructure investments and land scarcity forces us to also pay more attention to issues of land in urban discussions.

Yet how can we conceptualise land-related problems in order to connect and integrate rural and urban debates in overarching discussions of development? In this commentary, we argue for moving beyond the directly visible outcomes and presumed ‘culprits’ of land investments by critically analysing indirect and long-term effects of land acquisitions on people’s livelihoods as well as the differentiation of these effects for different actors.

We propose three specific arguments to disentangle the grab–development dichotomy:

1. placing a focus on the sequential chain of effects of displacement;
2. paying more attention to the ambivalent roles and contradictory interests of different actors; and
3. taking the three-dimensional aspects of land development into account.

Full text (PDF 13pp)

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May innovation on plant varieties share agricultural land with nature, or spare land for it?

an article by Simon Bordenave  (AgroParisTech, INRA, Paris, France) published in International Journal of Agricultural Resources, Governance and Ecology Volume 14 Number 3 (2018)

Abstract

The development of more productive varieties has been at the core of the transformations of agriculture and its environmental impacts throughout the 20th century. Among the various environmental effects of agriculture, the ability to choose between wide, low-intensity agriculture, and concentrated, high-intensity one, is a crucial component of its impact on biodiversity conservation.

The impact of an innovation on land use and intensity of agriculture is thus an important determinant of its environmental footprint. The existing literature has studied how innovation modifies land use, but has not focused on how it changes production intensity.

The objective of this paper is to complement the existing analytical framework to account for the impact of varieties improvements on non-land inputs. It shows that innovation can simultaneously reduce land use and increase agricultural intensity only if it is biased towards one of these production factors, demand is elastic and production factors are hardly substitutable.

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