Attention on land grabbing has intensively picked up since 2007-2008, in the wake of the global food crisis. This development has thus resulted in massive interests within the academia, with an aim to understand the phenomenon in terms of actors involved, the scale, nature of the deals, the role of the governments and its impacts of the affected societies and communities – or in abstract terms, the social, economic and political economy of land grabbing. I argue in this paper that, to understand the extent of the impacts of land grabbing at community level, it is important first, to get a grasp of how property in land is organised, the social relations around property in land and land uses. This paper therefore focuses on how access to property in land is organised, the varied benefits that people derive from property in land and what kinds of power relations necessitate access. I am particularly interested in the horizontal power relations and dynamics within or at the household level. I use the metaphor of “bundles of powers” to analyse the dynamics of powers that enable and constrain the ability to derive benefits from property in land. By using this approach, I show “how some actors control access to land, while others maintain their access through those who control access”1. My investigation goes beyond the descriptive level (the question of what different forms of power) to asking where the different forms of powers are derived from (structure) and how they are generated, combined, implemented (agency) individually. This paper is part of my ongoing PhD thesis on “understanding property in land (in rural north-central Namibia)”.
1 Ribot, Jesse & Peluso, Nancy: A Theory of Access. Rural Sociology 68(2), 2003, 153–181
