Jennifer Franco

Jennifer Franco

Co-coordinator of TNI's Agrarian Justice work

Jennifer Franco is a researcher working on land and rural politics issues.  After receiving a PhD in politics in 1997 in the US, she began working with the Philippine solidarity group in the Netherlands, and with local peasant organizations, rural community organizing and human rights groups, and research outfits in the Philippines in two regions faced with extreme landlord resistance to redistributive agrarian reform. She began working with TNI in the mid-2000s, on several projects on various topics involving local peasant movement and rural reform activists, human rights activists, and activist researchers from various countries and regions. In 2010 she joined the College of Humanities and Development (COHD) at the China Agricultural University in Beijing as an adjunct faculty and travels there twice a year to give seminars and work with junior faculty and MA and PhD students. She has lived in the US, Philippines, Canada and the Netherlands.  

Work area:

Agrarian Justice

Areas of expertise:

Peasant movements; rural democratisation and challenges; land and land reform in official overseas development policies of governments and some international institutions; European Union biofuels policy; and the global land grab.

Contact

Selected publications

From Threat to Opportunity? Problems with a “Code of Conduct” for Land-Grabbing
Contemporary discourses and contestations around pro-poor land policies and land governance
Global Land Grabbing and Trajectories of Agrarian Change: A Preliminary Analysis
The Global Water Grab: A Primer

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Recent content by Jennifer Franco

Are African land grabs really water grabs?

March 2013
Agrarian Justice: , Water Grabbing:
As land is grabbed and earmarked in Africa for supposed development, there are nearly always implications for the water nearby, for local people's land and water rights and environmental sustainability.

Chinese fracking plans prompt “water-grabbing” fears

March 2013
Water Grabbing:
China has become one of Asia's leaders in expanding unconventional shale-gas extraction in the name of energy self-sufficiency and national autonomy. Experiences of “fracking” worldwide, however, suggest the costs to China of joining this revolution will be loss of control of natural resources and land to major corporations, with negative social and environmental consequences for many communities.

Fracking and the global land grab

February 2013
Water Grabbing:
Linking the current booming of the newly applied and fast spreading technology for unconventional gas extraction within the broader pattern of land and water grabbing, this report defines fracking, why and where it is happening today, who is promoting it, how, and what is the state of resistance.

Competing political tendencies in global governance of land grabbing

December 2012
Land sovereignty:
Three political tendencies have emerged in response to land grabbing that are shaping the global debate and the potential future trajectory of land governance.

A ‘Land Sovereignty’ Alternative?

September 2012
'Green Economy': , Land sovereignty:
Dramatic changes around food, climate, energy, and finance in recent years have pushed questions of land use and land control back onto the centre stage of development discourse, at the very moment when the same conditions are spurring an unprecedented rush for land and water across the globe.

A ‘Land Sovereignty’ Alternative?

July 2012
Land sovereignty:
Land sovereignty is the right of working peoples to have effective access to, use of, and control over land and the benefits of its use and occupation, where land is understood as resource, territory, and landscape.

Water grabbing? Focus on the (re)appropriation of finite water resources

June 2012
Water Grabbing:
The fluid nature of water and its hydrologic complexity often obscure how water grabbing takes place and what the associated impacts on the environment and diverse social groups are.

The Global Water Grab: A Primer

March 2012
Water Grabbing:
Water grabbing refers to situations where powerful actors take control of valuable water resources  for their own benefit, depriving local communities whose livelihoods often depend on these resources and ecosystems.

Global Land Grabbing and Trajectories of Agrarian Change: A Preliminary Analysis

December 2011
The politics of change in land use and in property relations linked to cases of land grabbing are not well understood, and yet are crucial to a deeper understanding of the phenomenon.
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Land grabbing in Latin America and the Caribbean in broader international perspectives

December 2011
A critical re-assessment of a UN FAO study on land grabbing finds that a too-narrow definition has obscured evidence of land grabbing on a wider geographical scale than previously thought; this research includes new evidence of cases in Latin America and the Caribbean.