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Climate Change Policies, Land Grabbing and Conflict: Perspectives from Southeast Asia Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue canadienne d'études du développement ISSN: 0225-5189 (Print) 2158-9100 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcjd20 Climate change policies, land grabbing and conflict: perspectives from Southeast Asia Esteve Corbera, Carol Hunsberger & Chayan Vaddhanaphuti To cite this article: Esteve Corbera, Carol Hunsberger & Chayan Vaddhanaphuti (2017) Climate change policies, land grabbing and conflict: perspectives from Southeast Asia, Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue canadienne d'études du développement, 38:3, 297-304, DOI: 10.1080/02255189.2017.1343413 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02255189.2017.1343413 Published online: 28 Jul 2017. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcjd20 Download by: [83.57.8.203] Date: 28 July 2017, At: 05:36 CANADIAN JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES REVUE CANADIENNE D’ÉTUDES DU DÉVELOPPEMENT, 2017 VOL. 38, NO. 3, 297–304 https://doi.org/10.1080/02255189.2017.1343413 Climate change policies, land grabbing and conflict: perspectives from Southeast Asia Esteve Corberaa, Carol Hunsbergerb and Chayan Vaddhanaphutic aInstitute of Environmental Science and Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain; bDepartment of Geography, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada; cRegional Centre for Social Science and Sustainable Development and Centre for Ethnic Studies and Development, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand Introduction to the special issue Since the late 1990s, and particularly over the past decade, we have witnessed a prolifer- ation of land-related initiatives being globally promoted in response to the climate change “problem”. Some of these have been specifically designed and implemented to respond to decisions adopted under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), specifically its Kyoto Protocol. These include mitigation efforts aimed at increasing forest carbon stocks through reforestation programmes and through mitigation projects under the Joint Implementation and the Clean Development Mechanism (Wittman, Powell, and Corbera 2015). More recently, there have been efforts to promote forest conservation and management under the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) framework of the UNFCCC (Duchelle et al. 2014), and to mainstream “climate smart” agriculture (Chandra, McNamara, and Dargusch 2017). In parallel, we have witnessed the increasing cultivation of “flex crops”1 like oil palm, corn, soy or sugarcane around the world, while renewable energy technologies with direct impact on land use, such as hydro and wind power, have also been up-scaled. These trends respond to growing demand in the global food regime and global energy markets (IPCC 2011; McMichael 2010), but they have also often been framed as a means to mitigate climate change and address a broader environmental crisis. In fact, many renewable energy programmes and projects have been incentivised by climate change policy mech- anisms, such as carbon offsetting or targeted national subsidies, thereby contributing to reducing carbon emission, nationally and internationally. These land-related developments have sparked numerous controversies, even more so when deployed in the Global South or in countries with weak land governance frameworks and democratic deficits (Arezki, Deininger, and Selod 2011). On the one hand, for example, there is evidence that actions promoted or funded by the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol often have led to unintentional and undesirable impacts. It has been shown that CDM forestry and REDD+ projects2 can have detrimental impacts on local resource users and ecosystems, including: an increased labour burden on local popu- lations; a disruption of local institutions, particularly land tenure, in ways detrimental CONTACT Esteve Corbera [email protected] © 2017 Canadian Association for the Study of International Development (CASID) 298 E. CORBERA ET AL. to poor and disadvantaged social groups; limited income gains and elite capture; and the promotion of fast-growth tree species or exclusionary conservation activities (Aggarwal 2014; Bayrak and Marafa 2016). On the other hand, large-scale flex crops cultivation has often been preceded by seizing, expanding or transforming areas seen as “under-utilised empty lands” into more pro- ductive, and market-appealing, uses (White et al. 2012; Wolford et al. 2013). Through con- certed efforts by state and corporate initiatives, facilitated by international financial institutions, land has been taken away from the customary or legal control of local com- munities and farmers and put at the service of global commodity networks (Dell’Angelo et al. 2017). Displaced people and affected communities inserted into the labour regimes of large-scale farms can suffer from poor working conditions while a suite of other social and gendered implications occur at community level (Cochet 2017; Creutzig et al. 2013; Min- gorría et al. 2014; Nyantakyi-Frimpong and Bezner Kerr 2017). The local farming environ- ment is in turn radically transformed to give way to monocultures, while the broader hydrological cycle can also change (Mehta, Veldwisch, and Franco 2012). Large-scale renewable energy deployment has also resulted in problematic outcomes: wind farms, for example, have changed property regimes and deepened inequalities in access to land and off-farm income, in addition to creating disturbances that are poten- tially harmful to animal and human populations (Huesca-Pérez, Sheinbaum-Pardo, and Köppel 2016). Hydropower development has caused severe impacts on river ecosystems by affecting water flows and sediment transport, as well as social dislocation at times, trig- gering population re-settlement and loss of livelihoods (Kelly-Richards et al. 2017). When these land-related processes have involved the purchase or long-term lease of large tracts of land, media, non-governmental organisations and academics have referred to them as examples of the “global land grab” phenomenon (Borras et al. 2011). They have been labelled as “green grabs” when pursued in response to climate change and other environmental policies (Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012). The (green) “grabs” docu- mented in this special issue may or may not involve land-use and tenure change, but they do involve changes in control of land – or of related resources, such as trees, minerals or water flows – at the expense of the interests and rights of local communities. The “rush for land” has been riddled with conflict, involving land-related grievances across all involved parties and more or less institutionalised forms of local resistance (Cost- antino 2016). Conflict has occasionally involved physical evictions or armed violence; the latter particularly when such violence was already present before the land grab (Gómez, Sánchez-Ayala, and Vargas 2015; Rudi et al. 2014). Political reactions “from below” by affected social groups have not automatically emerged everywhere and every time. In some countries, the state apparatus may suppress or heavily control such mobilisations. Pre-existing forms of institutional injustice and cultural repression often reinforce disregard for the interests and land claims of the most disenfranchised and politically disorganised communities and social groups. Furthermore, where political reactions do occur in some form, they do not always manifest as opposition to the “grabbers” ; some are mobilisations to become inserted into the emerging agrarian-environmental enterprise enclaves (Borras and Franco 2013). States selectively deploy national and international governance instru- ments and principles to advance three possible, contradictory agendas: to facilitate, to miti- gate negative impacts and maximise opportunities or to stop and roll back land grabs resulting from these intersections (Borras, Franco, and Wang 2013). CJDS / LA REVUE 299 In addition to the analyses of environmental and social impacts highlighted above, scholars of land and green grabs are exploring the financialisation of agriculture and con- servation (Dempsey 2013; Fairbairn 2015), and the consequences of land/green grabs on rural labour (Li 2011; Neimark 2012; Osborne 2011). What remains under-explored are the effects of renewable energy investments on national political economies and local pol- itical ecologies (McCarthy and Thatcher, forthcoming), as well as the cumulative and interactive effects of multiple “grabs” undertaken for environmental and other purposes (Hunsberger et al. 2017). In our view, grabs driven by environmental or agricultural devel- opment agendas may run parallel to each other, but they may also overlap, intersect and interconnect: their promoters may be competing for the same block of lands; the “grabbed” lands may be adjacent to one another; the institutional bases for their parallel land control-oriented initiatives may be overlapping in contradictory or complementary ways; and so on. There may be spillover effects in terms of political economy and ecologi- cal and demographic processes as a result. The contributions in this special issue aim to shed light on the interconnections between environmental and agrarian processes, and social conflict, in the specific context of land interventions driven by climate change or economic development policies, with
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