Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - MIDLAND (Developing middle-range theories linking land use displacement, intensification and transitions)

Teaser

Land is a nexus for crucial societal and environmental challenges including food security, access to water, land degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change. Development of solutions to balance these tradeoffs and synergies is currently hindered by the lack of theories...

Summary

Land is a nexus for crucial societal and environmental challenges including food security, access to water, land degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change. Development of solutions to balance these tradeoffs and synergies is currently hindered by the lack of theories explaining the conditions under which different pathways of land change occur and lead to different outcomes, integrating human and environmental aspects.
This project develops and tests integrated middle-range theories explaining the linkages between three of the major processes in land systems, i.e., (i) land use intensification and expansion, (ii) land use displacement and trade, and (iii) land use transitions or regime shifts.
The work focuses on the emerging agricultural frontier of Southern African dry forests and savannas, which is a threatened and understudied region, and its linkages with distant places.
We analyze: (i) The strategic field of actors’ coalitions, institutions and distant linkages in emerging frontiers; (ii) Links between land use displacement, leakage, and local land changes; (iii) Pathways of agricultural expansion and intensification in tropical landscapes; and (iv) The conditions for transformative governance of land systems to foster resilient landscapes that sustain ecosystem services and livelihoods.

Work performed

\"Step 1 focuses on the strategic field of actors’ coalitions, institutions and distant linkages in emerging frontiers. Here, we first developed an ethnography of investors and commercial farmers in Northern Mozambique. We then developed a multi-sited investigation of investors\' decision making of transnational companies across Southern and Eastern Africa. This work integrates data collection across geographies, including places of production, i.e., farms and plantations, places of operational decision-making, i.e., national and regional companies\' headquarters, and places of financial investment decisions, e.g. financial centres in London and Amsterdam.
This work has started to generate: (i) An understanding of the role of waves and legacies in the making of the emerging investment frontier in Niassa province in Northern Mozambique, (ii) a proper comprehension of the strategic action field of land and natural resource competition in the emerging frontier of Southern Africa, and (iii) general hypotheses on the role of coalitions of local and distant actors in shaping the emergence of land use frontiers and land use regime shifts.

Step 2, which focuses on the structural relations between the main processes of land use changes (expansion and intensification, displacement through international trade, and non-linear transitions), has developed an approach for analyzing long-term time series of land use data to disentangle long and short-run causal relations between these variables. We have applied this approach to the causal linkages between changes in cropland area and intensity, in order to test the theories of land sparing, rebound effect, and induced intensification, and the conditions under which these distinct effects occur.

Step 3 focuses on pathways of agricultural expansion and intensification in tropical landscapes. Here, we are building a large-scale spatial database, covering four provinces in Northern Mozambique (an area of 390,000 km2), which maps land-use and land-cover changes over three decades, distinguishing different trajectories of agricultural changes over the recent decades (expansion and contraction of tree crop and annual crops, of smallholders and largeholders). This dataset builds on publicly-available data and algorithms from Google Earth Engine, so that the work is reproducible and extendable by other teams to surrounding and comparable regions, and the aim is that this database would be, when properly prepared and used, made publicly available. This database and the scientific work supporting it will allow for major breakthroughs in the monitoring and understanding of agricultural dynamics and in particular interactions between small and large-scale actors, such as so-called \"\"land grab\"\" dynamics.

Step 4, which focuses on the conditions for transformative governance of land systems to foster resilient landscapes that sustain ecosystem services and livelihoods, has only started in October 2018 with a workshop bringing together stakeholders and scientists.

Step 5, which aims at synthesize the progresses of the project and develop integrated theories of land systems, has led to a study which synthesizes and articulates progresses in theory development and testing in land system science, with a particular focus on middle-range theories. This study reviews the different theories explaining changes in land-use extent and intensity, such as deforestation, agricultural intensification, or frontier development. It then synthesizes them into middle-range theories of higher-level processes of land system changes, focusing on land-use spillovers and land-use transitions as non-linear, structural changes, including processes of land sparing and rebound-effect, leakage and indirect land-use change, and forest transitions.\"

Final results

The project is developing key progresses beyond the state of the art, in particular:
- An ethnography of investors and commercial farmers
- A multi-sited investigation of investors\' decision making
- A cointegration approach for disentangling long and short-run causal relations between land use variables
- A remote sensing approach based on Google Earth Engine to map large and small scale cropland.
- An articulation of middle-range theories in land systems.

Key integrated outputs of the project should include a proper understanding of the factors and processes leading to the emergence of land use frontiers, a theoretical structuration of the field of land system science, and insights regarding the governance of land use frontiers towards improving sustainability.

Website & more info

More info: https://erc-midland.earth.