Stealthy processes of land dispossession in Ngorongoro, Tanzania

In the paper “Making land grabbable: stealthy dispossessions by conservation in Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania” (published in 2021 in Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 5 (4): https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486211052860), Teklehaymanot Weldemichael looks into how it becomes possible that land is grabbed and people are relocated. It focuses on the historical conditions of land tenure that enable current land grabbing: what specific processes have taken place before land is grabbed and its original users relocated.

Based on an empirical analysis of policy and practices of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania, the author proposes that land grabbing – particularly in the context of conservation in Africa – is not an event that occurs in a vacuum. It is a result of long-term structural marginalisation of land users in ways that produce scarcity and undermine living conditions so as to make people relocatable and land grabbing justifiable. The local people relocate themselves “voluntarily” because they could not make a living or lead a decent life after systematic disinvestment in basic social services and/or after life has been made unbearable through restrictions imposed on the local peoples’ – in this case, the pastoralists’ – production practices. The paper highlights the need to focus on the stealthy process of dispossession rather than major land-grabbing events as starting points for analysis. Insights from this study could be useful in analysing other cases of land grabbing where large swathes of ostensibly empty land are made available for investment.

Posted on 27 March 2023 in Pastoralism & Natural Resources, Pastoralism & Services, Pastoralism, Mobility & Land Tenure, Pastoralism, Policy & Power