Land Acquisition and the Semantic Context of Land Within the Normative Construction of “Modern Development”

Abstract

This chapter aims to analyze how, historically, normative interventions on the idea of “development” at the Bretton Woods Institutions have defined a theoretical bias from which land and land acquisition has been represented. On the one hand, the chapter proposes a framework from which representations of land, land acquisition, and land ownership can be contextualized within scholarly literature on the concept of development. The second part of the chapter carries out an empirical case study on linguistic analysis to highlight how increasing levels of land concentration go hand in hand with normative interventions built at the top of the executive boards of an international architecture. The chapter reveals that rather than a coincidence, policies and recommendations on large scale land acquisition have made part of a highly institutionalized and ideologically defined discourse that has evolved semantically within selected periods of the history of these institutions.