Land, Labour and the Politics of Development

Latest events:

Find out about the 2023-2024 open and online webinars from the Land, Labour and the Politics of Development Study Group.

2023-2024 year in review:

Professor Colin Marx (UCL) left the study group in early March and Dr Mihika Chatterjee (Bath) joined the study group as co-convenor and chaired some of the SG webinars alongside Dr. Rama Salla Dieng (Edinburgh). In March 2024, both convenors of the study group participated in the Land Deals Politics Initiative’s international conference on Land Grabbing in Bogota, Colombia from 19-21st March.

Dr. Mihika Chatterjee convened a panel entitled ‘Rural Labour and Agrarian Politics in the South’ at the DSA 2024 conference. The panel had 10 excellent papers across 3 sessions, ranging from theoretical discussions on petty commodity production and repeasantisation to policy-urgent work on land tenure in peace arrangements.

In May 2024, the study group became a joint DSA-EADI study group. While our discussions and audiences cohere on frameworks and agendas largely from agrarian political economy and political ecology, we are keen to continue to converse with diverse disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives on land, labour and food, as well as focus on decolonising epistemologies of our core topics of interest.

Convenors:

• Rama Dieng, Lecturer in African Studies and International Development, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh
• Mihika Chatterjee, Lecturer in International Development, Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath

This Joint study group between EADI and the Development Studies Association was conceived to have scope to engage with policy makers and land, professionals, and to inform development policy and practice on land, and potentially can also provide a platform for collaborative research and publications amongst based researchers dispersed across multiple institutions in UK and internationally and others from the global South.

Central concerns for the study group convenors are with the political economy and political ecology of land, and labour; how the evolution of land institutions and tenure, and labour regimes relations is shaped by power in society; and in understanding the distributional outcomes of land and labour policies, interventions and governance arrangements, as well as their environmental consequences and overall sustainability. Research on land and labour policy & law, land, labour, capital & development trajectories, land rights formalisation, customary tenure systems, land & investment, land, labour, race, class & gender, land, labour & accumulation, capital and social reproduction, natural resource tenure & landscape governance, and impacts of land tenure and reform programmes all falls within the scope, but geographical and thematic focus topics are driven by members’ interests, and research papers put forward for discussion they may have to share.

Core Topics:

• Rural-Urban land relations
• Rural-Urban labour relations
• Rural-Urban Migration
• Agrarian crises and their political and policy implications
• Social reproduction and non-reproduction
• Capitalism (including racial capitalism)
• Sustainability and Climate Change
• Food sovereignty and food security
• Food and labour regimes
• Global value chains and production networks
• Feminist Political Economy Analyses
• Feminist Political Ecology Analyses

Mailing list

If you wish to join the Land, Labour and Politics Study Group mailing list, please visit this link.