The land grabbing phenomena grew in both reported cases and in scholarly interest after the 2008 financial crisis. The concept of land grabbing has been greatly debated and some have chosen the term large scale land acquisition instead, focusing on win-win outcomes while the land grabbing term rather focuses on the unequal power relations involved. Our study has defined land grabbing as; a global land rush characterized by transnational and domestic investors, governments and local elites taking control over land in order to produce food and other industrial commodities for domestic and international markets. The study's aim is to examine land grabbings implications on smallholders local livelihoods in Ethiopia and furthermore to reveal what narratives that are being promoted by the Ethiopian government to justify these land grabs. This to understand how the implications on smallholders' livelihoods and the narratives by the government match. The study is based in a qualitative methodology, basing most of the study's result in a literature review. The study is examined through a Political Ecology framework, focusing on political economy with theory influences from both Marx and David Harvey. Furthermore, the study will also combine the theoretical understanding of discursive power, focusing on development discourses, with a narrative analysis. Findings of the study show that the main narratives pushed by the government to justify said land grabs in the country was economic growth, further enabling a ‘development state’, modernizing pastoralists by providing stable income and changing living situations for pastoralists and increasing the food security in the country. Furthermore, the study found that the livelihood implications for smallholders have been overall negative, with outcomes such as displacement, loss of land and resources, weakened food security and also negative psychological and social impacts as well. Therefore the study could conclude that the Ethiopian government's argumentations have not matched with the lived realities for many smallholders.

En Afrique sub-saharienne, l’insécurité foncière associée aux régimes de droits fonciers dits “coutumiers” ainsi que la sous-utilisation d’intrants modernes sont deux facteurs souvent évoqués comme limitant le potentiel agricole de l’Afrique. Sur cette base, les décideurs politiques ont pensé et mis en place des interventions visant à individualiser le droit de la terre et à promouvoir l’adoption d’intrants améliorés. Cette thèse utilise des données originales collectées en République Démocratique du Congo pour étudier deux exemples de politiques publiques s’inscrivant dans cette lignée et mises en oeuvre à 50 ans d’intervalle. Elle montre qu’elles ont eu des implications de court terme et de longterme allant bien au delà de celles qui sont généralement attendues. Les deux premiers chapitres s’intéressent à une politique mise en oeuvre durant la dernière décennie de la colonisation belge qui entraîna l’individualisation de terres communales et leur allocation à des familles individuelles. Ils utilisent une expérience naturelle pour étudier ses implications sur les structures sociales et les mécanismes coutumiers de résolution des conflits. Le troisième chapitre s’intéresse à une politique récente de subvention d’intrants agricoles. En utilisant une expérience aléatoire, il montre que l’intervention a conduit à une augmentation de l’utilisation de semences améliorées, et analyse ses conséquences sur les décisions d’allocation des ressources en terre et en travail par les ménages. / Contending that tenure insecurity under informal “customary” land institutions and theunder-utilization of modern inputs are two important factors holding back sub-SaharanAfrican agriculture, policy makers have designed policies to shift communal rights towardmore individualization and formalization, and to promote the adoption of improved inputs.This doctoral thesis uses an original database to explore two examples of such policiesthat took place 50 years apart in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It shows that theyhad short-term and long-term implications far beyond those commonly expected. The firsttwo Chapters focus on an intervention by the Belgian Colony that took place during thelast decade of colonization. It led to the division of communal land and its allocation toindividual families. Using a natural experiment, they study its consequences for socialstructures and customary conflict resolution mechanisms. The third Chapter focuses on arecent agricultural input subsidies intervention. It uses an experimental design to show that the subsidies successfully increased the use of improved seeds, and analyses its implications for households’ labor and land allocation.

No description available.

This study examines intricately related questions of consciousness and learning, textually-mediated social coordination, and human relationships within nature, anchored in the everyday life practices and concerns of a remote First Nation community in the Treaty 9 region. Through the use of Institutional Ethnography, community-based research and narrative methods, the research traces how the ruling relations of land use planning unfold within the contemporary period of neoliberal development in Northern Ontario. People’s everyday experiences and access to land in the Mushkego Inninowuk (Swampy Cree) community of Fort Albany for example, are shaped in ways that become oriented to provincial ruling relations, while people also reorient these relations on their own terms through the activities of a community research project and through historically advanced Indigenous ways of being. The study examines the coordinating effects of provincially-driven land use planning on communities and territories in Treaty 9, as people in local sites are coordinated to others elsewhere in a complex process that serves to produce the legislative process called Bill 191 or the Far North Act. Examining texts, ideology and dialectical historical materialist relations, the study is an involved inquiry into the text process itself and how it comes to be put together. The textually mediated and institutional forms of organizing social relations—effectively land relations—unfold with the involvement of people from specific sites and social locations whose work is coordinated, as it centres on environmental protection and development in the region north of the 51st parallel. A critique of the textually mediated institutional process provides a rich site for exploring learning within the context of neoliberal capitalist relations and serves to illuminate ways in which people can better act to change the problematic relations that haunt settler-Indigenous history in the contemporary period. The work asks all people involved in the North how we can work to address historic injustices rooted in the relations and practices of accumulation and dispossession. The voices and modes of governance of Aboriginal people, obfuscated within the processes and relations of provincial planning, must be afforded the space and recognition to flourish on their own terms.

This study examines intricately related questions of consciousness and learning, textually-mediated social coordination, and human relationships within nature, anchored in the everyday life practices and concerns of a remote First Nation community in the Treaty 9 region. Through the use of Institutional Ethnography, community-based research and narrative methods, the research traces how the ruling relations of land use planning unfold within the contemporary period of neoliberal development in Northern Ontario. People’s everyday experiences and access to land in the Mushkego Inninowuk (Swampy Cree) community of Fort Albany for example, are shaped in ways that become oriented to provincial ruling relations, while people also reorient these relations on their own terms through the activities of a community research project and through historically advanced Indigenous ways of being. The study examines the coordinating effects of provincially-driven land use planning on communities and territories in Treaty 9, as people in local sites are coordinated to others elsewhere in a complex process that serves to produce the legislative process called Bill 191 or the Far North Act. Examining texts, ideology and dialectical historical materialist relations, the study is an involved inquiry into the text process itself and how it comes to be put together. The textually mediated and institutional forms of organizing social relations—effectively land relations—unfold with the involvement of people from specific sites and social locations whose work is coordinated, as it centres on environmental protection and development in the region north of the 51st parallel. A critique of the textually mediated institutional process provides a rich site for exploring learning within the context of neoliberal capitalist relations and serves to illuminate ways in which people can better act to change the problematic relations that haunt settler-Indigenous history in the contemporary period. The work asks all people involved in the North how we can work to address historic injustices rooted in the relations and practices of accumulation and dispossession. The voices and modes of governance of Aboriginal people, obfuscated within the processes and relations of provincial planning, must be afforded the space and recognition to flourish on their own terms.