AbstractsLaw & Legal Studies

The latest food, fuel, and financial crises raised tremendously the interest in global farmland. After decades of neglecting the agricultural sector, investment is urgently needed to close the yield gap in developing countries. While its drivers have been widely discussed, insights on underlying processes and associated impacts are still incomplete. This dissertation therefore analyses how the surrounding institutional environment shapes the implementation of an investment and how this in turn produces varying outcomes. It further provides a rigorous impact assessment with a focus on contract farming as a tool to commercialise farmers’ agricultural production in the vicinity of a large-scale investment in land. The empirical analysis is based on qualitative and quantitative data from Ghana and Kenya. The first essay (Nolte and Väth, 2013) shows that the present land governance systems in Ghana and Kenya are incapable to cope with the increasing pressure on land. As well-defined rules and proper enforcement are missing, the general process of acquiring land most often disregards the procedures laid down by the legislation. Hence, investors determine to a large extent how their specific project affects the host country. This in turn leads to repercussions for the land governance system. As investors often misuse the ‘institutional self-service shop’ to their own benefit, they provoke resistance by the local population, civil society organisations and the international community. Our comparative analysis therefore reveals that large-scale land acquisitions can trigger institutional reform of the land governance system. The second essay (Väth, 2013) displays that large-scale land acquisitions produce varying outcomes. A land governance system with poorly harmonised formal regulations and customary rules, as well as asymmetric power relations between investors, state agents and traditional authorities, allows actors to lobby for particular sub-groups of the local population and to convert outcomes of land acquisitions into own benefits. This case study further sensitises to rural social differentiation in the vicinity of an oil palm company. The analysis reveals that investment neither meets a homogenous local population nor yields to equal outcomes. Rather, it produces negative and positive effects depending on households’ distance to the company’s centre of operation, the amount of land a household loses, its possibility to gain permanent or casual employment or its chance to farm under contract. Thus, the essay discloses that large-scale investment in land is often neither completely detrimental nor fully beneficial, but requires accompanying measures to mitigate increasing inequality. The third essay (Väth and Kirk, 2014) focuses on the…