Global Finance and the land grab : mapping twenty-first century strategies.

Abstract

Understanding global land transformations today requires greater attention to finance, and how financial institutions are making land and property into financial assets. Drawing on geographical political economy and scholarship on financialisation, I question the nature and temporality of finance's new interest in land – notably, whether it is speculative and short term or an emerging longer-term strategy. I consider how different kinds of financial institutions invest in land differently, how they are mobilising value arguments and tools and how a growing scarcity of “safe“ assets may push even conservative financial players into new experiments with land and other accumulation frontiers.