Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the politics of knowledge and ontology surrounding land governance reinforces political economic trajectories by making it hard to see and enact land otherwise. In so doing, it contributes a much-needed ideational approach to futures studies.

Paper long abstract:

Africa is increasingly positioned as a “last frontier” of resource extraction and financialization globally, with renewed attention to its land, water, wildlife and sub-surface resources as productive and financial assets. Neoliberal reforms have further greased the wheels for transboundary flows of investment capital and profit, while providing secure access to land and favorable tax regimes for investors. African land futures are therefore being strongly shaped by the present moment – establishing path dependencies that will reverberate far into the future.

This paper takes these political economic processes not as its focus but its backdrop, exploring how “the politics of knowledge” surrounding land and its governance legitimate these political economic processes, while reinforcing these path dependencies by making it hard to see and enact land otherwise. It reveals how the World Bank, bilateral land donors and allied NGOs have contributed to the spread of ontological assumptions aligned with the neoliberal project, while sidelining place-based ontologies of land and security.

Drawing on the politics of knowledge (specifically, processes through which situated constructs are normalized and rendered universal) and the ontological turn (in its interrogation the concepts through which the world is brought into being), the paper makes a novel contribution to future studies by moving beyond the dominant focus on political economy to the neglect of other processes (Roth and Kaivo-oja 2016). It shows how futurity is “hemmed in” by the advanced specification of fields of vision and action through which certain constructs are advanced as universal truths, and others rendered invisible.