Power/knowledge/land: Contested ontologies of land and its governance in Africa. By Laura A. German, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2022. pp. 333. $90.00 (hbk); $39.95 (pbk). ISBN: 9780472075331, 9780472055333

Abstract

The global land grab has arguably been one of the most contentious issues in agrarian struggles and public policy debates of the early 21st century. In the wake of the capitalist crises in food, energy, climate and finance of the late 2000s, a diverse group of actors—from national governments to private corporations to individual and institutional investors, including pension funds, hedge funds, university endowments and sovereign wealth funds—rushed to acquire land in the Global South to produce and speculate on agricultural commodities. Africa, a region deemed to abound in so-called cheap, idle land, quickly became a hotbed of transnational land acquisitions, prompting concerns about neocolonialism and a ‘New Scramble for Africa’.

Laura German's book Power/Knowledge/Land: Contested Ontologies of Land and its Governance in Africa intervenes in the vast literature on the topic in ways that move beyond the classic theoretical moorings in agrarian political economy and critical studies of land and property. As the title suggests, she draws insights from the scholarship on the politics of knowledge and ontological anthropology to unsettle what she calls the ‘land governance orthodoxy’ or the ‘global knowledge regime’ on land that consolidated in the international development policy arena, in response to the public outcry over global land grabbing. This orthodoxy entails the mobilization of discourses and programs that promote such ideals as tenure security, women's empowerment and inclusive business to better manage large-scale land deals and ameliorate their adverse social consequences. German's driving thesis is that this orthodoxy has helped facilitate the commodification of land and the dispossession of customary rights holders, while masking the underlying drivers of the increasing land and livelihood insecurity in rural Africa today: the neoliberal push to privatize land and secure exclusive land access for investors.

Drawing on Chakrabarty (1992), German aims to ‘provincialize’ and denaturalize the dominant land governance constructs and their ontological premises, as revealed in key documents and websites of multilateral and bilateral donor agencies, development think tanks, nongovernmental organizations and private corporations. To scrutinize the seemingly self-evident truth claims and theories of change advocated by these entities, she provides a thorough systematic review of existing ethnographic evidence, while also using her own observations from fieldwork and engagement in the global land governance fora. Her methodological choice of drawing extensively on a wide range of published ethnographic works is an intentional one. By placing ‘ethnographic materials at the service of world-making’ (p. 3), she contributes to ‘a new anthropology of politics’ (Postero & Elinoff, 2019, p. 7) that calls attention to the limits of economic logics, technocratic managerialism and the urgent interventionism that undergird the practice of global development and land governance.

The book is organized in three parts. Part I, comprising two chapters, traces the emergence of an international consensus, albeit a fragile one, on what constitutes ‘good’ land governance. The first chapter is concerned with strategic discursive techniques multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank, the FAO and other UN agencies, deployed to ‘enhance the palatability’ (p. 62) of the land governance discourse and its accompanying concepts to counter the more charged language of land grabs. The three techniques she underscores in her analysis include the proliferation of crisis narratives that create a sense of urgency over particular problems over others, such as narratives of population growth, resource scarcity and tenure insecurity. Other techniques involve the creation of what Shore and Wright (1997) have called ‘mobilizing metaphors’, or a cluster of flexible keywords, such as rights, security, empowerment and inclusivity, that resonate with deeply held societal values and whose meanings can be stretched and moulded to serve particular purposes; and the utilization of legitimation tactics that justify actions that might otherwise be politically indefensible, such as the use of statistical tools to problematize the so-called yield gaps or the invocation of the idea of terra nullius to rationalize the exclusion and dispossession of rural people from the land. The fundamental problem with these discursive framings, German contends, is that it embodies an extremely narrow vision of what land is and how humans relate to it.

The second chapter builds on the first to examine the extent to which different actors within international development circles have ‘enrolled’ in the global knowledge regime on land. German finds a general discursive alignment across the different actor groups, with subtle but important differences in the political stance of socially progressive international nongovernmental organizations, particularly with respect to the role and effects of land titling. German argues that the processes of multi-stakeholder consultations, engagement and negotiations involved in creating policy instruments or solutions, such as land titling and voluntary guidelines on community consultation for land acquisitions, may have succeeded in generating an appearance of consensus on how land ought to be governed. Yet, this consensus was far from transformative, as it undercut meaningful conversations on and shifts in the oppressive global structures of power within which these solutions are embedded.

Part II, comprising four chapters, scrutinizes key ‘emergent truths’ of the land governance agenda. In Chapters 3 and 4, German offers a fine-tuned interrogation of the assumptions underlying the push for land titling. Broadly, these revolve around the idea that (a) women have insecure land access under customary tenure and that the best way to remedy the problem is to formalize land rights through registration and titling and (b) collective titling and community consultation are beneficial for protecting indigenous and rural people's communal territorial rights. Drawing on analysis of primary and secondary empirical research across Africa, German exposes the shaky evidentiary grounds on which these truth claims stand.

While acknowledging the longstanding debate in African studies around the colonial ‘invention’ of tradition, German nonetheless highlights the circumstances under which customary land relations are and have been beneficial for women. She insists that the debate on women's land rights, and the underlying assumption that property is tied to marriage, overlooks the multiple systems of descent, kinship, inheritance, age and conjugality (and I would add, religion) that mediate women's land access in Africa. Though not discussed in the chapter, it is worth mentioning that the contemporary push for formalizing (married) women's land rights in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South mirrors a key demand of the nineteenth century Western liberal feminist movement: securing property rights for married White women or wives in the idealized structure of the patriarchal nuclear family. German's critique of the imposition of Western constructs of marriage and the nuclear household in the contemporary land governance debate is not to deny the importance of conjugal relations, as one of many social relations, that mediate resource access, but an invitation to reflect on and reconsider the theory of change behind the push for individualized or joint titles for women.

Ultimately, the author makes a compelling and provocative argument that ‘the option of inaction may prove to do as much for women's land rights as the urgent interventionism that currently frames and curtails the field of vision and action in the land area’ (p. 159). Rather than a one-size-fits-all solution of titling, she advocates for approaches that attend to ‘context-specific threats, concerns, and aspirations’ of differentially positioned women and socially marginalized peoples. The author takes a similar stance in Chapter 4 in regard to collective titling and community consultation. Analysing comparative studies from Mozambique and Peru—two countries that are noted for having relatively strong protections for collective land rights—German problematizes collective titling as ‘a remarkably efficient strategy for dispossessing large numbers of land users while securing land for investors’ (p. 213). She also challenges the ways community consultations have been largely geared towards obtaining consent for land acquisitions, rather than protecting the rights of sovereignty and self-determination of indigenous and rural communities to define their own development priorities and visions.

What underlies the neoliberal push for land titling is a particular ontology of ‘security’. In Chapter 5, German argues that the ontological framing of ‘security as severance, independence, and exclusivity’ (p. 243) is a powerful discourse through which the world of neoliberal land governance is created and perpetuated, and through which law and the state are naturalized as neutral arbiters of social interests. In contrast, the author sketches out alternative conceptions of land and security that are grounded in values of relationality and reciprocity. Land, for diverse agriculturalists and pastoralists in Africa, is not solely defined in terms of ownership, but as part and parcel of one's social identity and belonging, or socio-cultural membership in particular communities and groups. In the last chapter of Part II, German focuses on the idea (or the oxymoron) of ‘inclusive business’ and highlights the disconnect between dominant narratives and lived realities on the ground. She contends that these two words, ‘inclusive’ and ‘business’, are inherently incompatible in an era where industrial farms and global value chains thrive on smallholder dispossession and exploitation of rural workers.

In a concluding chapter of Part III, German synthesizes the book's central arguments and discusses what it would mean to reconceptualize, reframe and reimagine land and rural futures. She calls for a deep engagement with the question of not just what land is, but what it might be, a profound semantic move that opens doors for imagination and potential for prefigurative politics. Building on the political aspirations and projects of subaltern and indigenous social movements, German advances a vision of what she calls ‘prospering in place’, that decentres universalizing theories, policies and concepts and honours relational orientation to land, security and belonging.

Power/Knowledge/Land is an outstanding book that is clearly written, carefully conceived and theoretically and politically incisive. Following Foucault, the strength of this book lies in its illumination of the productive force of discourse and language, specifically, how the creation and operation of the global knowledge regime on land is directly implicated in the making of the world. As someone who has previously worked and consulted for some of the organizations featured in German's analysis prior to a career in academia, I found the book and its deconstructionist approach a much-needed intervention in the study and practice of land policy and international development. The book and the ontological, epistemological and ethical questions it raises will be of interest to not only researchers, teachers and students of agrarian change, resource politics and rural development in and beyond Africa but also activists and professionals involved in the global land governance space.