A new phase of ‘foreignization’ and land grabbing is occurring via value-chain relations in Bolivia. Exogenous forces from some BRICS and MICs are penetrating Bolivia’s countryside and drastically changing social relations of production, reproduction, property and power.

What do booming cities and urban processes mean for the future of food systems?

What will happen when revenues from extractivism begin to dry up, and the short-term consumer boom, the welfare payments, and the class alliances that go with them, start to unravel?

What is the political significance of leveraging public policies in support of food sovereignty?

This Guide is drawn from experience in the action research project “Bottom-up accountability initiatives and large-scale land acquisitions in Africa”. The project aimed to bring the international soft law instrument, the Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of the Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests (the Tenure Guidelines or TGs), to rural communities and, together with them, to use the Guidelines to strengthen their tenure of land, fisheries and forests.

Situating questions about neoliberalism, nationalism and populism in Sri Lanka helps to broaden understanding of historical and political developments. Do neoliberal policies emerge in the West and then spread to the Global South, or do neoliberal policies evolve in confrontations with nationalist, populist and other political projects and go through considerable innovation in the Global South?

Governments, social movements, corporations, and marginalized people around the world are increasingly involved in struggles and negotiations about the control of land and resources. Questions of who gets what land, how, how much, why and with what implications are being vigorously contested in a variety of spaces.

What is the toll of downward mobility in rural and smalltown America?

How do dominant political-economic conditions articulate and manifest in rural spaces? This question is central to grasping the contextual dynamics of agrarian change and associated contestations, conflicts and struggles.

How can peasant territories foster emancipation?

An attempt to uncover some of the key political features of modern Zimbabwe.

An eco-efficient bioeconomy, combining environmental sustainability and economic advantage, has been promoted to alleviate resource constraints of rising global demand. For political forces resisting environmental degradation and people’s dispossession, several means are necessary to contest this global agenda and counterpose alternatives.

How has resistance in this region interacted with its past land struggles?

Access to and control over land and associated natural resources have long been key determinants shaping rural lives worldwide. Relationships to land, forests, water and aquatic resources influence whether rural working people are able to build decent and dignified livelihoods, avoid or escape hunger, participate in decision-making, avoid or escape political exclusion and marginalization, and sustain collective identities and social reproduction processes.

What kind of alternatives are required to address the crisis facing the rural world, and beyond this, the entire planet?

This paper examines the policies and practices on land of the Department for International Development (DFID) of the United Kingdom. After a market-led approach to land distribution in the 1980s, DFID made some changes towards a rights-based land policy, but this has since regressed.

It is depressingly clear that Copenhagen will at best produce a ‘political’ agreement—just as the Bali conference did two years ago—but not a global climate compact with time-bound, quantifiable, legally binding and enforceable goals or measures.

Using local public policy to create social change: what does history tell us?