Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of Nature

James Fairhead, Melissa Leach, Ian Scoones

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317850519
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Across the world, ecosystems are for sale. 'Green grabbing' – the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends – is an emerging process of deep and growing significance. A vigorous debate on 'land grabbing' already highlights instances where 'green' credentials are called upon to justify appropriations of land for food or fuel. Yet in other cases, environmental green agendas are the core drivers and goals of grabs. Green grabs may be drivn by biodiversity conservation, biocarbon sequestration, biofuels, ecosystem services or ecotourism, for example. In some cases theyse agendas involve the wholesale alienation of land, and in others the restructuring of rules and authority in the access, use and management of resources that may have profoundly alienating effects.

Green grabbing builds on well-known histories of colonial and neo-colonial resource alienation in the name of the environment. Yet it involves novel forms of valuation, commodification and markets for pieces and aspects of nature, and an extraordinary new range of actors and alliances. This book draws together seventeen original cases from African, Asian and Latin American settings to ask: To what extent and in what ways do 'green grabs' constitute new forms of appropriation of nature? What political and discursive dynamics underpin 'green grabs'? How and when do appropriations on the ground emerge out of circulations of green capital? What are the implications for ecologies, landscapes and livelihoods? Who is gaining and who is losing? How are agrarian social relations, rights and authority being restructured, and in whose interests?

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Green Grabbing: a new appropriation of nature?

James Fairhead, Melissa Leach and Ian Scoones

Across the world, ‘green grabbing’ – the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends – is an emerging process of deep and growing significance. The vigorous debate on ‘land grabbing’ already highlights instances where ‘green’ credentials are called upon to justify appropriations of land for food or fuel – as where large tracts of land are acquired not just for ‘more efficient farming’ or ‘food security’, but also to ‘alleviate pressure on forests’. In other cases, however, environmental green agendas are the core drivers and goals of grabs – whether linked to biodiversity conservation, biocarbon sequestration, biofuels, ecosystem services, ecotourism or ‘offsets’ related to any and all of these. In some cases these involve the wholesale alienation of land, and in others the restructuring of rules and authority in the access, use and management of resources that may have profoundly alienating effects. Green grabbing builds on well-known histories of colonial and neo-colonial resource alienation in the name of the environment – whether for parks, forest reserves or to halt assumed destructive local practices. Yet it involves novel forms of valuation, commodification and markets for pieces and aspects of nature, and an extraordinary new range of actors and alliances – as pension funds and venture capitalists, commodity traders and consultants, GIS service providers and business entrepreneurs, ecotourism companies and the military, green activists and anxious consumers among others find once-unlikely common interests. This collection draws new theorisation together with cases from African, Asian and Latin American settings, and links critical studies of nature with critical agrarian studies, to ask: To what extent and in what ways do ‘green grabs’ constitute new forms of appropriation of nature? How and when do circulations of green capital become manifest in actual appropriations on the ground – through what political and discursive dynamics? What are the implications for ecologies, landscapes and livelihoods? And who is gaining and who is losing – how are agrarian social relations, rights and authority being restructured, and in whose interests?

Introduction

Across the world, ecosystems are for sale. The commodification¹ of nature, and its appropriation by a wide group of players, for a range of uses – current, future and speculative – in the name of ‘sustainability’, ‘conservation’ or ‘green’ values is accelerating. For example, supporters of the Nature Conservancy and the African Wildlife Foundation are invited to ‘adopt an acre’ – or perhaps 50 acres for USD 1750 – in order to protect valuable wildlife heritage from human-induced degradation² (Nature Conservancy 2011, African Wildlife Foundation 2011). The web portal ‘Ecosystem Marketplace’ offers information updates and investment and price trend data on carbon, water and biodiversity markets. The website states ‘We believe that …markets for ecosystem services will one day become a fundamental part of our economic system, helping give value to environmental services that, for too long, have been taken for granted’. The aim of the information portal is to ‘spur the development of new markets’ and ‘facilitate transactions’³ (Ecosystem Market Place 2011). Meanwhile in Mozambique, a company with British capital negotiates a lease with the government for 15 million hectares (ha) or 19 percent of the country’s surface. Its interest is in the carbon stocks represented by the trees that can be grown on that land, and traded in emerging carbon markets (Nhantumbo 2011, 1).

These are all examples of the phenomenon captured within Guardian journalist John Vidal’s brutal term, ‘green grabbing’ (Vidal 2008). Green grabbing – the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends – is an emerging process of deep and growing significance. ‘Appropriation’ implies the transfer of ownership, use rights and control over resources that were once publicly or privately owned – or not even the subject of ownership – from the poor (or everyone including the poor) into the hands of the powerful. It is an emotive term because it involves injustice; it is what Robin Hood objected to. Appropriation is central to the dual, related processes of accumulation and dispossession. This can be simple capital accumulation, in which profits accruing to capital are reinvested, increasing capital and the concentration of its ownership. Or it can be primitive accumulation, in which a more publicly owned nature is enclosed into private ownership, and existing claimants are expelled (or have rights attenuated) to become a proletariat separated from land and nature, releasing resources for private capital (De Angelis 2001, Glassman 2006, Kelly 2011).

Green grabbing can be understood as part of the vigorous debate on ‘land grabbing’ more generally, a debate which already highlights instances where ‘green’ credentials are called upon to justify appropriations of land for food or fuel (Borras et al. 2010, 2011, 2012, under review). Thus large tracts of land are acquired not just for commercial farming, but for ‘more efficient farming to alleviate pressure on forests’. The massive expansion of palm oil plantations is not just for commercial biofuel, but for carbon-neutral fuel. Such instances certainly represent discursive extensions of what we are calling green grabs, but here we use the term to focus on instances where environmental agendas are the core drivers. The commercial deal is thus intended to serve ‘green’ ends – whether through biodiversity conservation, biocarbon sequestration, the protection of ecosystem services, ecotourism or ‘offsets’ related to any and all of these. In the process, notions of’green’ (and what, and who, is green or not) come to be defined and mobilised in particular ways. While grabbing for green ends does not always involve the wholesale alienation of land from existing claimants, it does involve the restructuring of rules and authority over the access, use and management of resources, in related labour relations, and in human-ecological relationships, that may have profoundly alienating effects.

This collection draws together a range of such environmentally-driven cases. They address local and national settings in East, West and Southern Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, and ecologies that range from lowlands to highlands, from humid forests to drylands, and from farmscapes to pastoral and wildlife-rich zones. The cases reveal the extraordinary variety of actors who have become involved: pension funds and venture capitalists, commodity traders and consultants, brokers and aggregators, GIS (geographic information system) service providers and technology procurers, business entrepreneurs and salespeople, green activists and anxious consumers, as well as NGOs and state agencies. All now interact in an array of relationships that link across local and global scales. New forms of coalition and alliance are emerging between what might once have seemed unlikely bedfellows: businesses and NGOs, conservationists and mining industries, or ecotourism companies and the military, to mention but a few identified in the papers that follow.

This collection seeks to analyse the world of these actors, the processes they are involved in, and their effects. By drawing on a diversity of fine-grained empirical cases and relating these to a wider examination of the political, economic and discursive processes underlying the appropriation of nature, and the implications for agrarian change, we ask: what is new? Are contemporary modes of appropriation of land and resources for apparently green ends extensions of processes that have long operated, or are they in some sense qualitatively different? The phenomenon we are terming ‘green grabbing’ certainly builds on long and well-known histories of colonial and neo-colonial resource alienation in the name of the environment – whether for parks, forest reserves or to halt assumed destructive local practices (Peluso 1992, Neumann 1998, West et al. 2006, Adams and Hutton 2007). Yet there is also something quite new afoot, in terms of the actors, as well as the cultural and economic logics and political dynamics involved. In the twentieth century era of ‘national parks and protected areas’ there always were more interested parties than the state and conservation organisations – the scientific community and tourist industry for example – but today there are many more players implicated, who are more deeply embedded in capitalist networks, and operating across scales, with profound implications for resource control and access.

‘Green’ and economy: material and discursive transformations

Before turning more directly to an exploration of new modes of appropriating nature, a note is needed on our analytical scope. We would not be the first to notice that contradictions have emerged between the rapidly growing global economy and the earth’s resources. If the green movement has transformed, it is in response to this contradiction: it has stepped from the critical margins to hold centre stage in an advocacy of a new global ‘green economy’, firmly located in capitalist networks (UNEP 2011), and as part of a vision of ‘ecological modernization’ where economic growth and environmental conservation work in tandem (Mol and Spaargarden 2000). Things green have become big business and an integral part of the mainstream growth economy. So if, in the twentieth century, the ‘green movement’ could be depended on as a critical voice and an antagonist with ‘industry’, countering the ravages of capitalist expansion and voracious economic growth, this is increasingly difficult to uphold. Whilst in the twentieth century, conservation agendas were surely implicated in the alienation of land and the regulation of land use by colonial and post-colonial regimes, this was often not with commercial intent (though it often had commercial effects) (MacKenzie 1988, Adams 2004). Now it is explicitly so.

Part of this transformation is associated with the ‘neoliberal turn’ and the neoliberalization of environmental arenas of governance (Peck and Tickell 2002, Larner 2003, Castree 2003, 2008a, 2008b, McCarthy and Prudham 2004, Robbins and Luginbuhl 2005, Liverman and Vilas 2006), as well as the privatisation and commoditization of nature (Mansfield 2004, 2008, Bakker 2005, 2009, Heynen and Robbins 2005, Heynen et al. 2007). As Castree (2008a, 143) has noted, neoliberalism is necessarily an environmental project with ‘the non-human world as a key part of its rationale’. Of course nature, economy and society have never been separate and distinct, but instead are mutually constituted as socio-natural entities (Mansfield 2008, Smith 2008). Equally, the socio-cultural dimensions of commodities ‘as vectors of social relations and cultural identities and as a means of interrogating practice of production, consumption and material culture’ have been emphasised in recent work (Bakker 2005, 542, Robertson 2007). Drawing on these understandings, and inspired in particular by much older theoretical insights from Marx, Polanyi, Gramsci and others, in recent years there has been a veritable explosion of scholarship examining the neoliberalization of environments, nature and conservation, styled recently as ‘Nature TM Inc.’⁴, but also drawing on older traditions of ecological/green Marxism (Benton 1996, O’Connor 1998) and critical political ecology (Peet and Watts 1996). The papers in this collection are indebted to this work, but hopefully also move beyond it, locating the discussions in a particular concern for the implications of changing agrarian relations resulting from these multiple and diverse appropriations of nature. For this, the insights of critical agrarian studies, and attention to the complexities of empirical contexts – and their ‘uneven geographies’ – is vitally important. Some of the critical literature on neoliberalizing nature adopts a rather uniform position, assuming a singular hegemonic project, failing sometimes to analyse the consequences for diverse, differentiated and contingent settings (Bakker 2009). Perhaps, as Castree (2010c, 2011) suggests, this is because some commentators become blinded by homogenising assumptions about the nature of neoliberalism, as well as showing a lack of analytical clarity about the underlying processes involved. In this collection we are led by the empirical particularities of diverse cases, and attempt to draw some wider insights into the complex relationships between the processes of ‘green grabbing’ and agrarian change in the context of diverse forms of neoliberalism.

As the contradiction between the global economy and the global environment becomes more apparent, nature is becoming increasingly valuable: a source of profit. Analysis of this contemporary materiality and the political economic relations co-produced with it must therefore be central to any consideration of green grabbing (McMichael 2009, 2012). The basic questions of agrarian political economy are as relevant as ever: Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what? And what do they do with the surplus wealth that has been created? (Bernstein 2010). Indeed such questions are accentuated, we argue, as nature and ecosystems become valued in new and multiple ways. As Moore (2000) argues, every phase of capitalism emerges from a restructuring of nature-society relations. At the same time, the new value of nature is clearly also associated with the global discourses that have been attributing value to it, making an analysis of discursive framing critical too. There would be no carbon-trading without the science-policy discourses that have discerned global warming (Newell and Patterson 2010). There would be no enclosures for biodiversity without the scientific and discursive processes that identified its global significance and threatened status (Corson and MacDonald 2012). There would be no ‘payments for ecosystem services’ (PES) without the particular framing of late-twentieth century global environmental problems by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005), the science-policy assessment that spawned the PES concept (Corbera et al. 2007, Redford and Adams 2009, Nature 2009, McAfee and Shapiro 2010, Kosoy and Corbera 2010). Most of the emerging ‘green markets’ implicated in green grabbing are trading in such ‘discursive commodities’, as well as influencing material political-economic conditions on the ground.

A key analytical line pursued in this collection is therefore to explore the relationship between the science-policy world that establishes these commodities and the operation of markets, and their tangible effe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Green Grabbing: a new appropriation of nature?
• 2. Enclosing the global commons: the convention on biological diversity and green grabbing
• 3. Green grabs and biochar: Revaluing African soils and farming in the new carbon economy
• 4. Green multiculturalism: articulations of ethnic and environmental politics in a Colombian 'black community'
• 5. Conservation, green/blue grabbing and accumulation by dispossession in Tanzania
• 6. Green pretexts: ecotourism, neoliberal conservation and land grabbing in Tayrona National Natural Park, Colombia
• 7. Tourism and the politics of the global land grab in Tanzania: markets, appropriation and recognition
• 8. Marginal lands: the role of remote sensing in constructing landscapes for agrofuel development
• 9. Green grabbing at the 'pharm' gate: rosy periwinkle production in southern Madagascar
• 10. Inverting the impacts: Mining, conservation and sustainability claims near the Rio Tinto/QMM ilmenite mine in Southeast Madagascar
• 11. Taming the jungle, saving the Maya Forest: sedimented counterinsurgency practices in contemporary Guatemalan conservation
• 12. Wild property and its boundaries: on wildlife policy and rural implications in South Africa
• 13. Trajectories of land acquisition and enclosure: development schemes, virtual land grabs, and green acquisitions in Indonesia's Outer Islands
• 14. The potential perils of forest carbon contracts for developing countries: cases from Africa
• 15. Ordenamento Territorial: Neo-developmentalism and the struggle for territory in the lower Brazilian Amazon
• 16. Why green grabs don't work in Papua New Guinea
• Index