Land governance and land deals in Africa: opportunities and challenges in advancing community rights
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the converging focus on “governance” by those donors and scholars who promote investment in land in Africa as well as by scholars and activists who criticize what they call “land grabs.” This focus on governance is particularly found in terms of understanding and assessing socio-economic consequences among the communities for the land deals, investment initiatives which have been accelerating on the continent over the last decade and longer. This article expands the concept of governance by examining how structures of authority and power are also involved in defining who belongs, or who has claims to belong, to these territories. It explores the topic of land deals and community rights through the conceptual lens of governance and belonging, the ability to be recognized as part of the community at various levels of action (including in terms of national citizenship). It starts with an examination of the recent increase in land investments in Africa, setting out its broad parameters, including public criticisms raised and some of the protests around them, and noting some of the key issues on which scholars have focused. In the next two sections, the article analyses these processes through the conceptual lens of governance and belonging as a way to bring out what the article proposes are key issues for assessing matters on community rights in regards to investments concerning natural resources in Africa, particularly over land. This analysis raises questions about those who uncritically promote Free and Prior Informed Consent as the solution to ensure “communities” approve any land deals.Keywords: Land grabs, governance, Africa, community, politics of belonging
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it