The Tragedy of the Grabbed Commons: Coercion and Dispossession in the Global Land Rush

TLDR

Small‑scale farming communities depend on customary commons, yet large‑scale land acquisitions are expanding worldwide and may threaten these systems, whose internal governance is robust but vulnerable to external global forces that can overwhelm local rights. The authors argue that the global land rush is eroding common‑property systems and introduce the concept of commons grabbing to investigate this phenomenon. They coded selected land‑acquisition cases on acquisition mechanisms, property claims, production changes, and coercive dynamics, then applied association tests and qualitative comparative analysis to examine interactions. The analysis found that 44 of 56 cases examined could be classified as commons grabbing.

Abstract

Rural populations around the world rely on small-scale farming and other uses of land and natural resources, which are often governed by customary, traditional, and indigenous systems of common property. In recent years, large-scale land acquisitions have drastically expanded; it is unclear whether the commons are a preferential target of these acquisitions. Here we argue that the contemporary global "land rush" could be happening at the expense of common-property systems around the world. While there is evidence that common-property systems have developed traditional institutions of resource governance that make them robust with respect to endogenous forces (e.g., uses by community members), it is less clear how vulnerable these arrangements are to exogenous drivers of globalization and expansion of transnational land investments. In common-property systems, farmers and local users may be unable to defend their customary rights and successfully compete with external actors. We define the notion of "commons grabbing" and report on an exploratory study that applied meta-analytical methods, drawing from the recent literature on large-scale land acquisitions and land grabbing. Informed by political economy and political ecology approaches, we coded selected cases on the basis of acquisition mechanisms, claims and property rights, changes in production system, and coercive dynamics, and explored the interactions between the different variables using association tests and qualitative comparative analysis. We found that the majority of the cases included in this analysis (44 of 56) could be examples of commons grabbing.