Large-scale land acquisition in Ghana : institutional change, gender and power / Kristina Lanz.

Introduction: Land grabbing as institutional transformation -- The policy context: Feeding Africa while doing business -- the anti-politics of LSLA -- Chasing the evolutionary role of chiefs in local land relations -- Implementation of a land deal in a plural legal setting -- "They said they were bringing a development project." -- The evolution of local livelihoods and impacts of the large-scale land investment -- Conclusion: Contested land deals, gendered power relations -- Epilogue: From research to action.

"This book examines a large-scale land acquisition project for rice production in Ghana's Volta Region, which has been purported by some as a social and ecological showcase with the company entering a 'community-private partnership' with affected communities. Celebrated by national and international media, the project has received substantial amounts of funding from various donor organisations and claims to empower women through its much-lauded out-grower project. While discourses of 'development', 'sustainability' and 'women's empowerment' are used by the investment company, the state and the customary authorities to legitimize the large-scale land acquisition, this book highlights how the deal mainly benefits the powerful elite, including elite women, and generally increases the depreciation of those already most marginalized, such as poor female-headed households and settler communities who were dependent on resources from the commons now enclosed and transformed into a rice farm. The author adopts a New Institutionalist perspective in social anthropology in order to analyse how this land acquisition has been implemented in a plural institutional context and how different actors use different rules and regulations and associated legitimating discourses to increase their bargaining power and to pursue their own interests in a changing legal context. In addition, this perspective shows how benefits and losses are distributed along different intersecting axes of power, such as class, gender, clan membership and age. By focusing on power, gender and legitimization strategies in the context of institutional change caused by the large-scale land acquisition, this book fills a gap in the literature on large-scale land acquisitions, while at the same time contributing to the development of a theoretical perspective on institutional change, power relations and ideological legitimization. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of land and resource grabbing, agricultural development and agribusiness, land management and development studies more broadly"-- Provided by publisher.