Land as a Transactional Asset: Moral Economy and Market Logic in Contested Land Acquisition in India

Abstract

The state seizure of land from farmers for development projects has triggered numerous protests in India. How far can these protests be characterized as a Polanyian countermovement to reclaim rights on land, resisting the encroachment of neoliberal market forces on society? Based on field research conducted in 2013–17 in two villages in prosperous western Uttar Pradesh that were host to a series of dramatic and violent protests in 2011, this article argues that rather than reclaiming land from commodification, the farmers were using the land as a market instrument, a transactional asset, in negotiating for a better deal within a dominant market‐driven template. The author suggests that valuing land as a transactional asset to be deployed in the market symbolizes a new moral economy in this region, prompted by increasing risk in farming, improved economic standing and aspirations, and a lack of faith in the neoliberalizing state and political institutions.

Land Acquisition, Markets and Political Networks: Evidence from the Indian Sundarbans

“…Accordingly, anti-land acquisition movements in India are seen as resistance by the tradition based marginalized communities to the forces of a market oriented neo-liberal state (see for example, Banerjee-Guha, 2013;Sampat, 2015). The economic aspect of the problem and our position finds some support from Nair (2019), whose field study in peri-urban villages of western Uttar Pradesh, show that the farmers, driven also by the logic of the market, use their land as a 'transactional asset' to negotiate better deals.…”

Is the influence of neoliberalism on development norms waning? Evidence from the Addis Ababa Action Agenda and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

“…This implies further that the idea that neoliberalism is the framework in which political and economic decisions are embedded cannot be taken for granted, as it often is. Much recent work on, for example, gender (Bessa, 2019), conflicts over land (Nair, 2019), sustainable development (Borras Jr. & Franco, 2018;Brisbois et al, 2019;Kauffman & Martin, 2017;Sealey-Huggins, 2017), labour relations (Agarwala, 2019), resource extraction (Childs & Hearn, 2017;Gilberthorpe & Rajak, 2017), state-community relations (Bennett, 2018;Devika, 2017;Schilling-Vacaflor & Eichler, 2017;Vijayakumar, 2018), philanthropy (Kumar, 2018) and microcredit (Guérin & Kumar, 2017) tends to refer rather uncritically to neoliberalism as the decisive context for social and economic change. Moreover, this literature employs the term to describe both state deregulation and increased government control of populations, making neoliberalism a rather blurred concept.…”

Fictitious commodification and agrarian change: Indigenous peoples and land markets in Highland Ecuador

“…On the other hand, I argue that when combined with collective mobilization and state intervention, land markets created opportunities for indigenous peasants to obtain land and, in some cases, reverse historical processes of colonization and dispossession. I also show that land commodification sets in motion changes that can limit resistance to the market over the long run, highlighting the need to historize and contextualize land commodification and recognize the complexity and heterogeneity of the process (Goodwin, 2018;Levien, 2007;Li, 2014;Nair, 2019).…”