What happened when the land grab came to Southeast Asia?

Abstract

This introduction to the collection seeks to determine to what extent the specialist regional literature on agrarian and environmental transformations in Southeast Asia has responded to land grab studies, and how scholarship on Southeast Asia contributed to the broader field. We argue that at the centre of land grab studies is what Mara Goldman calls a ‘standardized package’ that we use to explore the ways that the field of land grab studies has been taken up in the Southeast Asian literature; the places and topics that receive the most attention and those that tend to be deemphasised and underrepresented; and efforts to critique and ‘decentre’ the global land grab and processes of land grabbing in the existing literature and in the contributions to this collection. We suggest that Southeast Asian scholars contributed to the dynamism of the field by pushing for greater nuance, context and historical specificity, and integration of longstanding academic theories and concerns. These efforts are part of the productive tension between opening up the range of topics and processes under study on the one hand, and maintaining unity and centring of the field on the other, that has been fundamental to land grab studies.

Keywords:

• land grabbing
• Southeast Asia
• agrarian and environmental transformations
• science studies

Acknowledgements

This paper has benefitted considerably from careful readings and critical comments by two anonymous reviewers for this journal, as well as Mike Dwyer, Nancy Peluso and Rob Cramb. We would like to thank Jun Borras for his ongoing encouragement and support as we completed this paper. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the organisers of the conference in Chiang Mai entitled Land grabbing, conflict and agrarian-environmental transformations: perspectives from East and Southeast Asia, which provided the initial impetus for this collection of papers, and for many of the ideas in this introductory essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Laura Schoenberger http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7781-9485

Notes

1 On these projects and efforts to track them see GRAIN (2008); Ito, Rachman, and Savitri (2014, 42); Manahan (2011); Nooteboom and Bakker (2014); Woertz (2013, 197).

2 For an Indonesian sample see Potter (2016, 156); Gillespie (2016, 301); Susanti and Budidarsono (2014, 119); Barral (2014, 241); Gellert (2015, 68).

3 The World Bank report on land grabbing, for instance, devotes significant attention to oil palm expansion in Indonesia and Malaysia from 1990 to 2007, but distinguishes that period from the contemporary land rush (Deininger and Byerlee 2011, 19–22; Deininger 2011, 221).

4 Calculations by the authors.

5 Oil palm area in the Philippines, at least, still seems fairly limited (see Montefrio and Dressler 2016, 119; Menguita-Feranil 2013, 97).

Additional information

Funding

Peter Vandergeest's participation was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under grant number 435-2014-1407. Laura Schoenberger was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under grant number 767-2011-0280.

Notes on contributors

Laura Schoenberger

Laura Schoenberger is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at York University, Canada. Her research interests are in political ecology, agrarian transformations, state power, conflict and land. She is currently completing her dissertation on land control and property formation in the context of large-scale land acquisitions and recent state efforts to redistribute land in Cambodia. Corresponding author: [email protected]

Derek Hall

Derek Hall is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and the Balsillie School of International Affairs at Wilfrid Laurier University. His research interests include the political economy of food, land and agriculture in Eastern Asia; Japanese overseas agricultural investments; and the relationship between capitalism and decommodification. He is the author of Land (Polity, 2013) and, with Philip Hirsch and Tania Murray Li, of Powers of exclusion: land dilemmas in Southeast Asia (NUS Press and University of Hawai'i Press, 2011). Email: [email protected]

Peter Vandergeest

Peter Vandergeest is a professor of geography at York University, in Toronto. His research over the past 30 years has focused on agrarian and environmental transformations in Southeast Asia, and has encompassed attention to forests, agriculture, aquaculture and, most recently, fisheries.