Nodes of Resistance to Green Grabbing: A Political Ecology

Abstract

Green grabbing is the privatization or appropriation of land for purposes of advancing a “green” economy while excluding local, indigenous people from natural resources. This is a problem of global scale that has arisen mainly during a historical period when free market, neo-liberal policies have dominated the world economy. The academic literature on the subject rarely mentions resistance to green grabbing, nor are there many efforts to critically and syste-matically examine the social dynamics of this process. We consider both what works and what fails during the process of opposition, as well as the social psychology of risk taking among both green grabbers and opponents. The paper concludes with a way forward proffering the resistance.

Keywords: green grabbing, privatization, social psychology

JEL Classification: Z1