Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of Nature

‘Green grabbing’ is an emerging process of deep and growing significance, whether linked to biodiversity conservation, biocarbon sequestration, biofuels, ecosystem services, ecotourism or ‘offsets’. This collection explores these new ways of valuing, commodifying and appropriating nature, and the implications for people, ecologies and livelihoods.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Green grabbing builds on well-known histories of colonial and neo-colonial resource alienation in the name of the environment. Yet it involves novel forms of valuation, commodification and markets for pieces and aspects of nature, and an extraordinary new range of actors and alliances. This book draws together seventeen original cases from African, Asian and Latin American settings to ask: To what extent and in what ways do ‘green grabs’ constitute new forms of appropriation of nature? What political and discursive dynamics underpin ‘green grabs’? How and when do appropriations on the ground emerge out of circulations of green capital? What are the implications for ecologies, landscapes and livelihoods? Who is gaining and who is losing? How are agrarian social relations, rights and authority being restructured, and in whose interests?

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.