Development as a Trojan Horse? Foreign Large-Scale Land Acquisitions in Ethiopia, Madagascar and Uganda

By Dr. Sandra J.T.M. Evers and Dr. Kassahun Berhanu

The past decade has been characterized by an unprecedented rise in foreign, large-scale land acquisitions in Africa. While commonly presented as a development opportunity for national governments and local communities, such projects often trigger livelihood shifts, dislocation from ancestral lands and pervasive social, cultural, environmental, and economic changes. Impacts of land deals on local heritage-making, livelihood processes and ontologies anchored in land have yet to be fully measured. While foreign land acquisitions have fundamentally altered power structures and relationships in host countries, analysts currently struggle to respond to these new paradigms with appropriate theoretical models. We propose a multidisciplinary, theoretically and methodologically innovative approach to examine the dynamics of poverty, sustainability and development within the context of foreign land acquisitions. Our model – referred to as ‘zones of intermediality’ – will be tested in four comparative case studies in Ethiopia, Madagascar and Uganda.