Emergent Global Land Governance

Abstract

Land governance is currently the focus of many new global rule-making projects, marking a sharp break with past practices that sought to exclude land as an international governance issue. Wide-ranging concerns about land grabbing and its exclusionary and ecological consequences have driven this, prompting states and global civil society to devise new global land-governance instruments. This chapter offers a preliminary theoretical and empirical analysis of what is conceptualized as "emergent global land governance," focusing primarily on its international governance dimensions. A review of relevant land-governance policy instruments in the fields of investment, land tenure, and forestry suggests that emergent global land governance is likely to consist of multiple, overlapping instruments with diverging normative frameworks and objectives that are not closely coordinated instead of a singular, discrete international regime.