Messy hectares: questions about the epistemology of land grabbing data

Abstract

Recent research on land deals reports gigantic quantities of hectares seized, with relatively little regard for the solidity of the evidence or for considerations of scale other than area. This commentary questions the usefulness of aggregating data of uneven quality and transforming it into ‘facts’. Making claims on the basis of problematic evidence does not serve agrarian and human rights activists well, since it may undercut their legitimacy and make it difficult for them to identify their adversaries. Studying land tenure and corporate ownership is inherently complicated, with intractable legibility problems. Social scientists must subject their sources to critical scrutiny and understand the contexts of their production, preservation and dissemination. An accelerated process of dispossession is clearly in motion, but countering it effectively requires precise and accurate data, which are difficult to obtain. Oversimplified claims may not only undermine efforts to counter specific cases of land grabbing – and claims about land grabbing more generally – but may also divert attention from less publicized cases and from the actors behind the land grabbing. They also tend to reduce land grabbing to a quantitative problem rather than focusing on the social relations that it may or may not transform.This is a much revised and expanded version of a paper presented at the Plenary Session Roundtable on Methodologies: Identifying, Counting and Understanding, International Academic Conference on Global Land Grabbing II, organized by the Land Deals Politics Initiative (LDPI), Cornell University, 17–19 October 2012. I am grateful to Jun Borras, Andrés León, Carlos Oya, Katherine Verdery and this journal's reviewers for comments that contributed to sharpening an earlier draft.

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