Shifting frontiers: the making of Matopiba in Brazil and global redirected land use and control change

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

There are not fixed conditions that make potential agricultural frontiers attractive to capital: different spaces and strategies are chosen in relation to previous failed experiments, including those strongly contested by social movements. Socio-environmental contestations can also inadvertently result in negative spillovers, or a kind of indirect land use change. I propose a concept of redirected land use and control change for cases with strategic adaptations by promoters of frontiers. I suggest three dimensions of adaptations – across spaces, political-administrative regimes and in forms of land appropriation – to apprehend the multi-scale politics of land grabbing, through the case of Matopiba in Brazil.