This book examines a large-scale land acquisition project for rice
production in Ghana's Volta Region, which has been purported by some to
be a social and ecological showcase of a 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 outgrower project.
Although discourses of "development", "sustainability" and "women's
empowerment" are used by the investment company, the state and the
customary authorities to legitimise the large-scale land acquisition,
this book highlights how the deal benefits mainly the powerful elite,
including elite women, and generally increases the depreciation of those
already most marginalised, such as poor female-headed households and
settler communities that 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 legitimisation
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 contributing to the development of a
theoretical perspective on institutional change, power relations and
ideological legitimisation.
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.
