The politics of evidence: methodologies for understanding the global land rush
By I. Scoones, R. Hall, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., B. White, Wendy Wolford. 2013
267 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The most recent ‘land rush’ precipitated by the convergent ‘crises’ of fuel, feed and food in 2007–2008 has heightened the debate on the consequences of land investments, with widespread media coverage, policy commentary and civil society engagement. This ‘land rush’ has been accompanied by a ‘literature rush’, with a fast-growing body of reports, articles, tables and books with varied purposes, metrics and methods. Land grabbing, as it is popularly called, is now a hot political topic around the world, discussed amongst the highest circles. This is why getting the facts right is very important and having effective methodologies for doing so is crucial. Several global initiatives have been created to aggregate information on land deals, and to describe their scale, character and distribution. All have contributed to building a bigger (if not always better) picture of the phenomenon, but all have struggled with methodology. This JPS Forum identifies a profound uncertainty about what it is that is being counted, questions the methods used to collate and aggregate ‘land grabs’, and calls for a second phase of land grab research which abandons the aim of deriving total numbers of hectares in favour of more specific, grounded and transparent methods.
Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6e5149d08d9d09c023be803fd5795d70b536d313
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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
In Soil Science
Citations in the corpus
- Carbon colonialism and the new land grab: Plantation forestry in Uganda and its livelihood impacts (2014, background): “In utilising the term ‘land grab’, we acknowledge the contestation related to its meanings and use, including the methodologies by which the phenomena has come to be measured and understood, or what is widely referred as ‘the politics of evidence’ (Scoones et al., 2013).”
- The geographic and sectoral patterns of large-scale farmland investments in sub-Saharan Africa (2014, background): “As pointed out by Rural Modernity (2012a) and Scoones et al. (2013), when researchers circulate weak data without proper qualification that contributes to the perpetuation of excessively simplistic, inaccurate, and counter-productive narratives.”