August 22, 2022
We are online! After many months of work, we are happy to present the website to our institutional landscapes project. This is also a call to other researchers to contribute to this space as guest writers. The websites and the book move between a global outlook and situated accounts, generated primarily in the geographical settings of Aotearoa New Zealand and Tanzania. Such a project eventually reaches its limits. Once we treat farmland investments as “boundary objects” to which scholars contribute from different geographical, theoretical, and methodological angles, this is not necessarily a bad thing. It is rather an invitation to different scholars to assemble the rich insights they have generated on the finance-driven land rush through their own research since 2007/08 in one dedicated space in a reflective manner. A particular focus will be put on emerging perspectives in a fast-changing field, where sometimes assumptions and statements made in the past hold no longer true in the present; where just another crisis or government regulation has crashed the dreams of investors; where suddenly AG tech and not farmland is heralded as the most promising new “asset class”, or where methodological advances now suddenly allow us to account in more granular ways about trends and investment footprints in the ‘AG space’. It is also a chance for scholars to revisit their own (past) research in light of recent advances in debates and research findings. We will offer fellow researchers exposure on the platform, as well as graphic design services in case you would like to contribute figures or photos. Over the coming months (and years?), we plan to curate posts on the following themes: