Land grabbing, investors, and indigenous peoples: new legal strategies for an old practice?

This article examines how new legal strategies need to be adopted by indigenous peoples to react to the increasing phenomenon of ‘land grabbing’ taking place across the globe. In examining the specificity of the ‘land grab’ and how it particularly affects indigenous peoples, it analyses how new legal strategies targeting the investors need to be adopted by communities to mitigate some of the negative aspects of land grabbing. It argues that since the current ‘land grab’ is driven by investors it is important that indigenous peoples, and their supportive organisations, target investors and lending institutions which are behind the massive investments in land acquisitions.

Blending adaptive governance and institutional theory to explore urban resilience and sustainability strategies in the Rome Metropolitan Area, Italy

Adaptive governance is an emerging theory in natural resource management. This paper addresses a gap in the literature by exploring the potential of adaptive governance for delivering resilience and sustainability in the urban context. We explore emerging challenges to transitioning to urban resilience and sustainability: bringing together multiple scales and institutions; facilitating a social-ecological-systems approach and; embedding social and environmental equity into visions of urban sustainability and resilience. Current approaches to adaptive governance could be helpful for addressing these first two challenges but not in addressing the third. Therefore, this paper proposes strengthening the institutional foundations of adaptive governance by engaging with institutional theory. We explore this through empirical research in the Rome Metropolitan Area, Italy. We argue that explicitly engaging with these themes could lead to a more substantive urban transition strategy and contribute to adaptive governance theory.