Introduction to the special issue – Frontiers of property: promises, pitfalls, and ambivalences of ‘resurgent collectivisation’ in global land and resource governance

Abstract

Over the last several decades, a growing number of states, international organisations, and NGOs have pressed for new legislation and policies to formally recognise previously neglected options for collectively owning – rather than simply accessing or managing – lands and natural resources. In both ex-European colonies and other transitional development contexts, accompanying legal reforms have often taken on explicitly restitutive overtones, framed as a means of redressing the dispossessions or other injustices associated with both colonial and authoritarian iterations of land and resource governance. In this special issue, we explore the promises, pitfalls, and ambivalences of these phenomena as manifestations of what we term “resurgent collectivisation”, understood as the (re)emergence or reconstitution of governance interventions enabling the collective ownership of lands and resources. Deepening engagements between political geography and political ecology, contributions to the special issue engage diverse case studies of resurgent collectivisation in South Africa, Kenya, India, and Romania, highlighting: i) the implications of shifting – and often contested – fixations of collective subjectivity-property relations; ii) tensions between de jure collectivisation and de facto initiatives to establish vernacular private property or hybridised property regimes; and iii) emerging articulations of collectively-titled lands and resources with resurgent influxes of (often ostensibly ‘green’) capital into rural areas.