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Abstract

Land governance is currently the focus of many new global rule-making projects, marking
a sharp break with past practices that sought to exclude land as an international
governance issue. Wide-ranging concerns about land grabbing and its exclusionary and
ecological consequences have driven this, prompting states and global civil society
to devise new global land-governance instruments. This chapter offers a preliminary
theoretical and empirical analysis of what is conceptualized as “emergent global land
governance,” focusing primarily on its international governance dimensions. A review
of relevant land-governance policy instruments in the fi elds of investment, land tenure,
and forestry suggests that emergent global land governance is likely to consist of
multiple, overlapping instruments with diverging normative frameworks and objectives
that are not closely coordinated instead of a singular, discrete international regime.