Inverting the Moral Economy: the Case of Land Acquisitions for Forest Plantations in Tanzania

Abstract
Governments, donors and investors often promote land acquisitions for forest plantations as global climate change mitigation via carbon sequestration. Investors’ forestry thereby becomes part of a global moral economy imaginary. Using examples from Tanzania we critically examine the global moral economy’s narrative foundation, which presents trees as axiomatically ‘green’, ‘idle’ land as waste and economic investments as benefiting the relevant communities. In this way the traditional supposition of the moral economy as invoked by the economic underclass to maintain the basis of their subsistence is inverted and subverted, at a potentially serious cost to the subjects of such land acquisition.
Description
Full text can be accessed at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01436597.2015.1078231
Keywords
Land acquisitions, Moral economy, Carbon forestry, Idle land, Sustainable investments, Tanzania
Citation
Olwig, M.F., Noe, C., Kangalawe, R. and Luoga, E., 2015. Inverting the moral economy: the case of land acquisitions for forest plantations in Tanzania. Third World Quarterly, 36(12), pp.2316-2336.