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A decade after the methodological debates of the late 2000s land-rush scholarship, this paper asks why it has been – and why it remains – so hard to get good land-deal numbers. We review the state of land-deal quantification using the example of the Land Matrix. We then use the case of China’s state support for Chinese agribusiness investment in Laos to locate the ongoing trouble of ‘bad’ land-deal numbers in the politics of ongoing state formation. In doing so, we show how bad numbers are often an effect of the same internal state dynamics that facilitate land grabbing in the first place.
Dwyer et al. (Thu,) studied this question.