Research Seminar - Wednesday 2nd December

Lorenzo Cotula, International Institute for Environment and Development

The spread and deepening of economic globalisation has highlighted the ever closer connections between the international legal arrangements governing the global economy on the one hand, and claims to land and natural resources on the other. As pressures on valuable lands intensify and land relations become more transnationalised, increasing recourse to international investment treaties is redesigning spaces for land claims at local and national levels.

This paper explores the interface between international investment treaties and local land rights. It focuses on the recent wave of large-scale land deals for agribusiness plantations in low and middle-income countries (‘land grabbing’ for the critics). The analysis connects two topics that have attracted much public attention (‘land grabbing’ and investment treaty negotiations), and aims to interrogate issues relevant to both policy and academic debates.