Seeing Land like International Organizations: Strategic Selectivity and the Global Land Rush

Abstract How do international organizations (IOs) “see” land? Building on evidence in Critical Agrarian Studies, this article investigates this question with a focus on how global governance contributes to the global land rush. Drawing on Li’s heuristic of “making land investible,” we identify four strategies in IO reports that render land legible as a policy object and facilitate its commodification. We show that IOs play a strategic role in the global land rush by selecting economistic ways of seeing land. Yet, to varying degrees, they are less selective, seeing land in plural ways. This applies more to IOs whose mandate deviates from market interests (UNEP) than those whose goal is entrenched in commodification (WTO). Importantly, though, the logic of seeing land as an economic resource runs through the entire sample. IOs are rendering land investible across the bord; only some do it almost exclusively, thus seeing selectively (overlooking other meanings of land) while others seem more open, or less selective, thus being able to see other meanings of land, such as heritage, ecological and cultural services. Based on Poulantzas, we show how a focus on material interests underlying governance institutions can offer explanations of their “strategic selectivity” in seeing land. This helps understand why some IOs are strongly selective about what they see in land, while others have more discretion at how they make land legible. The resulting contradictions in their ways of seeing land can serve a strategic function in establishing the permissive structure that sustains the land rush.