TY - JOUR
T1 - Do laws provoke or prevent green grabbing? A systematic review
AU - Esteve-Jordà, Clara
AU - Scheidel, Arnim
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2025/4/25
Y1 - 2025/4/25
N2 - As the ecological transition accelerates, green grabbing is expected to intensify. Our systematic review of 80 empirical cases offers an overview of how soft and hard legal frameworks can both enable and prevent green land acquisitions. While current international development policies legitimise, and national laws operationalise, green grabs, accelerating the shift from communal to private property regimes, some cases highlight the transformative potential of ‘law from below’. These bottom-up legal reforms, driven by grassroots initiatives, may offer meaningful resistance to mitigate the impacts of green grabbing.
AB - As the ecological transition accelerates, green grabbing is expected to intensify. Our systematic review of 80 empirical cases offers an overview of how soft and hard legal frameworks can both enable and prevent green land acquisitions. While current international development policies legitimise, and national laws operationalise, green grabs, accelerating the shift from communal to private property regimes, some cases highlight the transformative potential of ‘law from below’. These bottom-up legal reforms, driven by grassroots initiatives, may offer meaningful resistance to mitigate the impacts of green grabbing.
KW - Green grabbing
KW - large-scale land acquisition
KW - law-from-below
KW - legal dimensions
KW - social activism
KW - systematic literature review
UR - https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2025.2483262
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=105003484215&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/03066150.2025.2483262
DO - 10.1080/03066150.2025.2483262
M3 - Article
SN - 0306-6150
SP - 1
EP - 25
JO - The Journal of Peasant Studies
JF - The Journal of Peasant Studies
ER -