Bureaucracy versus land grabbing? Replacing the state in a fashionable debate in Tanzania.

Auteur:

Sina Schlimmer

Date de publication:

11 Juillet 2016

Mots-clefs:

Accaparement des terres
Tanzanie
politique
transactions

Publié ici :

12 Juillet 2016

Mis à jour le :

03 Septembre 2017

Langue de publication:

Anglais

Zone géographique:

Afrique

Sina Schlimmer, »Bureaucracy versus land grabbing? Replacing the state in a fashionable debate in Tanzania », Mambo! Volume XIV (4), 2016

“So how will you just make a grab on village land? If you want a village land you have to get first of all the consent of the villages and then go another step, make a transfer from village land to general land. And then from general land, getting the land as a derivative title of Tanzanian Investment Center. All these steps. If you have to go through all that kind of bureaucracy and you’re still making grab [rire] it’s either intended that you have that land but not land grabbing, no. That will not be possible. […] the land tenure system itself has got its own cumbersomeness. And you won’t be very successful in land grabbing. Show me just two or three successful land grabs in Tanzania where you can sit back and say OK, this one is successful.” (Interview with a Tanzanian land lawyer, 15/04/2015, Dar es Salaam). Tanzania is considered a target country of the recent wave of land investment which has been hitting the Global south since the late 2000s (Cotula, 2013 ; Deininger et al, 2011; German et al, 20111). The debate refers to a seemingly new dimension of land transfers, commonly qualified as land grabbing, whereby private stakeholders and multinationals acquire large plots in countries where land is supposed to be abundant, idle and unused. Seeking for food security, alternative energy sources or more material objects of speculation, investors from industrial and emergent countries negotiate land deals especially for the cultivation of food crops and biofuels. Regarding the situation of land investment in Tanzania, the Landmatrix, an international database capturing land deals all over the globe, records 36 land transfers between the Tanzanian government and foreign investment companies in 2016.2

This hype about the accumulation of land deals has triggered a heated controversy in Tanzania which is stimulated by politicians, journalists and experts. Many debates focus on the question whether a land deal can be labelled as a land grab or not. Civil society organisations and media actors are very committed to the issue and conduct research to identify cases of dubious land acquisitions. Their reports about land grabbing are contested by state agencies or land lawyers. As demonstrated in the introductory statement by an independent land expert from Dar es Salaam, one of their arguments is that the procedures of land acquisition by foreign investors are too complex to allow land grabs by outsiders. We argue that the debate about whether there is land grabbing or not veils an important scope of analysis, which is the role of state institutions and state- building processes in the negotiation, promotion, but also the circumvention of such land deals. Basing, firstly, on a review of the legal land acquisition processes and, secondly, on the land deal with the British company Sun Biofuels (SBF) in the district of Kisarawe, we defend the thesis that state actors keep on influencing the negotiation of land deals. Whereas the case of SBF has been viewed as a prime example of the foreignisation of land control in Tanzania, a more detailed analysis sheds light on the complex set of interactions between administrative authorities, institutions and state agents which form the core of the transaction. We argue that contradicting interests and power struggles on different bureaucratic levels can influence, detour or even circumvent the success of a land transfer.

Unbundling the Tanzanian state in the context of land deals

The international image of land grabs, shaped by an important media hype, refers to more or less arbitrary land acquisitions by foreigners whereby the investors’ interests are seen to be the driving forces of the transactions. It depicts dichotomous and asymmetric actor’s constellations, whereby a stronger (in terms of economic, knowledge-related and relational resources) stakeholder seizes the (more or less acknowledged) land rights of a weaker single or group of actors. States where land is grabbed are considered as being weak, fragile or even absent. This strong versus weak-dichotomy of the land grabbing discourse and the focus on the role of the investors disguises the complex negotiation processes which can provide significant insights into the analysis of state formation. Although some scholars have shifted their focus on the impact of the host states in land deals, the literature generally equates the state to a homogenous entity acting through one single voice (Wolfard et al, 2013). Secondly, the authors who address the intervention of host states often limit their scope on the collaboration between state elites and foreign investors. According to Sandra Evers et al. “the state […] acts as a crucial actor in creating the fertile ground for foreign investment” (Evers et al, 2013). If state actors or rules intervene in the deals they necessarily pave the way for land acquisitions.

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Bureaucracy versus land grabbing? Replacing the state in a fashionable debate in Tanzania.

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Bureaucracy versus land grabbing? Replacing the state in a fashionable debate in Tanzania.

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Date de publication:

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Langue de publication:

Zone géographique:

Visiter le site web

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