Land Grabbing, Large-Scale Land Acquisition and Gender

This bibliography aims to provide a guide to the landscape of research on land grabbing, large-scale land acquisition (LSLA) and gender. This bibliography is primarily comprised of academic literature but includes a non-comprehensive selection of non-academic resources, such as research from international organizations and NGOs.

This bibliography not only compiles literature on gendered vulnerabilities to land grabbing and LSLA, including women’s insecure land tenure, whether customary or statutory (also addressed in the Consortium’s “Land Tenure and Gender” bibliography); it also addresses gendered implications of land grabs, including inequalities in labor, leadership and compensation. This bibliography draws a distinction between the broader questions of land rights (for resources on land rights, see the Consortium’s “Land Rights and Gender” bibliography) and those of land grabbing and LSLA, underscoring how the systems and institutions that benefit from such control rely on distinctly gendered distributions of power.

Though “land grabbing” and “large-scale land acquisition” are terms that are used to refer to largely the same phenomenon, “large-scale land acquisition” is the term more frequently used in academic scholarship on the topic, while NGOs and activists critiquing this phenomenon more often use “land grabbing.” In the compilation of this bibliography, the Consortium used a guiding definition of land grabbing as: “…the control (whether through ownership, lease, concession, contracts, quotas, or general power) of larger than locally-typical amounts of land by any person or entity (public or private, foreign or domestic) via any means (‘legal’ or ‘illegal’) for purposes of speculation, extraction, resource control or commodification at the expense of peasant farmers, agroecology, land stewardship, food sovereignty and human rights” (Eco Ruralis 2016).

Bringing a feminist lens to this topic, this bibliography not only compiles literature on gendered vulnerabilities to land grabbing and LSLA, including women’s insecure land tenure, whether customary or statutory (also addressed in the Consortium’s “Land Tenure and Gender” bibliography); it also addresses gendered implications of land grabs, including inequalities in labor, leadership and compensation.

This bibliography was created by the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, as part of our Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace and Planet (FRSPP) project. The FRSPP focuses on the transnational economic actors and processes that tend to deepen the inequalities that underlie armed conflicts and to undermine the prospects for peace that is both politically and environmentally sustainable. Its goal is to provide: forward-looking expert knowledge of those processes; analyses of their impacts on gender relations and other structural inequalities underlying armed conflicts; and recommendations for how to engage and modify those processes to be more supportive of the societal transformations critical to building gender-equitable, sustainable peace. Topics addressed in the FRSPP include, inter alia: the economic recovery policy prescriptions of international financial institutions; extractive industries and natural resource policy; land rights, large scale land acquisition and land grabbing; infrastructure reconstruction; and climate disruption.