Governing land investments: global norms, local land tenure regimes, and domestic contingencies in Uganda and Sierra Leone

Following the outcry and fierce debates around ‘land grabbing’ in relation to the rise of foreign transnational large-scale land investments in the Global South since 2007, a plethora of international regulatory initiatives and global norms have emerged with the aim to make such investments more responsible and socially and environmentally sustainable. It remains unclear how and when such guidelines are invoked in practice in investment cases, and whether their use can prevent land conflict and protect local land rights as human rights, as promoted. This PhD project studies the conditions under which global norms for responsible investments may gain traction in cases of large-scale land investments in two different country contexts, Uganda and Sierra Leone. What accounts for the uneven invocation and use of international guidelines in addressing local land conflict? Much literature perceives of the idea of global norms to safeguard land rights in cases of large-scale land investments as deeply flawed and sees them as global governance tools to promote and justify neoliberal principles of privatisation, commodification and land appropriation. My research offers a more variegated picture. In line with theories of human rights norms implementation that finds that such norms tend to be adopted when local conditions are receptive, I draw attention to the important role of and variation in local land governance institutions and contingencies in shaping the extent to which and how such global norms gain traction in cases of large-scale land investments. The analysis focuses on (1) the prevailing land tenure regimes, (2) the stakes of the national government in investment projects, and (3) the ‘strength’ of the government vis-à-vis the international community. These three dimensions, I argue, are interlinked and vary at the subnational level, thus accounting for the uneven ways in which global norms are implemented.