IFRI, African Studies Center, Center for South Asian Studies, and Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Large Scale Land Transactions

April 20-21, Dana Building Dow Commons

IFRI, in collaboration with African Studies Center, Center for South Asian Studies, and Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Michigan, will host a workshop on large-scale land transactions. This workshop brings together a group of 14 scholars working on land transaction issues in Africa and South and South-East Asia. Papers to be presented in this workshop cover two themes:

• Critical institutionalist (historical-geographical-political ecology) approaches that see tenure as a continuous unfolding process involving historically contingent and uneven power relations, with empirical emphasis on ethnography and attention to difference and detail in history, spatiality, and how the biophysical interacts with the social.
• Institutionalist approaches that see tenure as following from and amenable to governance reform, with empirical emphasis on categorization of tenure regimes and exploration of variation in outcomes.