Justice and Fairness for Mkangawalo People: The Case of the Kilombero Large-scale Land Acquisition (LaSLA) Project in Tanzania

ABSTRACT

Large-scale land acquisitions (LaSLA), otherwise ‘land grabbing’ in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), raise difficult normative questions the current literature does not sufficiently explore. LaSLA is associated with development opportunities; however, it also threatens the well-being of local people because of displacement and dispossession. To investigate the processes and outcomes for LaSLA to be considered as ‘just and fair,’ we evaluate the impacts of a LaSLA project on local livelihoods in Tanzania. Specifically, we apply John Rawls’ Theory of Justice to the project and compare the results with empirical insights gained from our fieldwork. We find that LaSLA has the potential to improve the living standards of local people, we cannot consider LaSLA as just and fair because it contradicts Rawls’s principles of justice and deteriorates the livelihoods of local people. Our findings suggest that it is critical to scrutinize LaSLA investments, involve local people in decision-making, and build the capacity of host governments to negotiate better LaSLA deals.

KEYWORDS:

• Large-scale land acquisition
• land grabbing
• John Rawls theory
• human rights
• Tanzania
• land justice and fairness

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Prof. Ann Kinzig and Prof. Ben Minteer and several anonymous reviewers for comments on past drafts of this paper. We would also like to thank the Center for Biology and Society (CBS) in the School of Life Sciences (SOLS) at Arizona State University (ASU) their support in numerous ways.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

Affiliation where research was conducted: Arizona State University

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.