ECAS 2013

One of the most dramatic developments in Tanzania in recent years is the movement to formalize property rights. The process, which started in 2004 in Mbozi District, Mbeya Region, has been rapidly spreading to other regions of the country. A particularly interesting aspect of the titling process in Tanzania is the multiplicity of actors involved and with that a plethora of explanations of the importance of formalizing property rights. Most recently donors are considering a massive upscaling of formalization to protect farmers from land grabbing, secure property rights and reduce conflict. At the same time donors are sponsoring what could be largest land grab in the history of the country. Under the SAGCOT (Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania) program announced in 2012, the government has promised to transfer 17.9% of village land to the general land category for foreign investment with arguments that plenty of land is freely available and unoccupied. Part of the drive to formalization thus entails the surveying, mapping and planning of village land areas with the intention of demarcating some land for transfer to the general lands category. Yet in our four-year study in Manyara and Mbeya regions, one of the lead causes of violence and conflict is the setting of boundaries both between villages under formalization efforts and between villages and large-scale private investor landholdings. As but one example: in the fertile and water-rich Kiru Valley of Manyara region, displaced landless villagers have taken up armed resistance, looting and burning investor properties and contesting their assigned roles as wage laborers on vast sugarcane and rice plantations. The paper will map out the terrain of contestation, conflict and dispossession at the core of the political economy of property right formalization in rural Tanzania, where a process of ‘dispossession by formalization’ is arguably underway.

This paper identifies and analyses non-violent protests against large-scale land acquisitions in Sierra Leone. The study is situated in the context of an ongoing transformation of the rural environment: since 2007, vast tracts of the country's arable land have been up for sale on the international market. Weak regulation facilitated a series of rapid and opaque land deals, the terms of which are only recently entering into public awareness and debate. The investments are now beginning to restructure rural political economies, creating new opportunities and constraints for affected communities. They are also raising tensions and conflicts within communities, and between them and the governments and companies involved. From different perspectives, NGOs, land owners, land users and other stakeholders have called attention to and protested against injustices, suffering and inequalities related to the land deals. This paper investigates the responses of affected communities and the relationships between local, national and international agencies articulating and publicizing criticisms of the 'land-grabs'. It traces the diverse origins and forms of the protests, based on documentary sources, interviews and ethnographic research in an affected community. It considers their political significance, placing these new struggles in the context of histories of violent and non-violent activism in rural Sierra Leone, and assessing their implications for conflict transformation.

The paper deals with a highly contested "development" project to show the conflicting visions and the power relations between the state and some Nubian communities. What happens when the local people whom were previously perceived as objects and consumers of "development" have become active subjects and try to control their own destiny? What kind of resistance can we get when the developmentality loses its credibility and the locals are actively engaged in production of counter critical knowledge?

The paper analyzes the different driving forces behind the Nubian resistance, namely; their deep connectedness to their homeland, dis-trust of the state, the government authoritative and coercive intervention, state driven harmful experiences that they have in their collective memories, lack of participatory spaces and the role of Nubian intellectuals in mobilization for resistance. All these factors and others have contributed to the escalation of the Nubian resistance that has stopped Kajbar proposed dam for more than two decades. Relying on the empirical materials and theoretical perspective from my ongoing PhD project; I argue that locals' counter voices against hegemonic state interventions can no longer be silenced. Moreover, the governments' attempt to ignore or suppress this resistance in a situation of extreme locals' delegitimization of the state leads to more conflicting situation in Africa, and in Sudan in particular. My argument attempts neither to lionize nor to homogenize the local resistance, it only highlights the necessity of taking the local resistance seriously.

As part of the rebuilding efforts following the long civil war, the Liberian government has renegotiated long-term contracts with foreign investors to exploit natural resources. Some accounts suggest that up to 50% of the land in Liberia has been handed out in large-scale concessions in the last five years (CICR, 2012; Oxfam, 2012). While this may promote economic growth at the national level, such concessions are likely to have major environmental, social and economic impacts on local communities, who have often not been consulted on the proposed developments. Drawing on the first two authors' recent research and on the professional experience of the third author, this paper explores the potential socio-economic and environmental impacts of a proposed large-scale oil palm concession in Gbarpolu county and the complexity of community land rights and resistance to agricultural concessions in Liberia. Ecosystems services mapping suggests that the proposed concession could have far-reaching environmental consequences, in terms of the loss of high canopy and secondary rainforest, which is a crucial source of carbon storage and biodiversity. Participatory workshops to map community and forest resources reveal the centrality of land and forest resources to people's sense of identity and belonging, their present and future livelihoods and food security and their resistance to the planned development. Gendered and age-related differences in priorities and impacts are explored. Concerted efforts to lobby government and other key stakeholders may help to achieve legal reform and enhance community participation in re-negotiating contracts for proposed concessions in future.

In Madagascar, local land rights are protected by the legal-institutional framework. However, legal routes are rarely followed by those whose rights are being adversely affected by large-scale land deals. Instead, their protest actions usually develop at the interface between the formal and the informal, the state and the non-state and between the local and the global.

Drawing on recent data from 5 agribusiness investments in Madagascar, this paper brings some answers to the following questions:

-Who are those who, locally, seek to resist the large-scale land transfers? What allows them, as opposed to other disgruntled groups/individuals who remain silent, to do so?

-What is presented as the main motivation of their protest action (dispossession, displacement, encroachment of cultural heritage, discrimination or lack of positive discrimination in job allocation, compensation mechanisms etc)?

- What means, contacts, networks do they mobilise?

-What repertoires of actions do they resort to?

-If violent action is taken, against whom is this violence addressed (the investor's team, other local groups or individuals, state or customary power-holders etc)?

-And finally do these mobilisations affect the outcome of formal negotiations (size and location of leased/sold land, conditions of the investment etc)?

In answering these questions, this paper seeks to outline the multi-scale, multi-normative dynamics at work in the resistance actions taken against large-scale land deals at the local level. It also aims to identify some of the conditions for mobilisations to be effective in a context of legal pluralism and neopatrimonial politics such as that of Madagascar.