Seeing Land like the European Union: The EU’s external Land Politics

Land is experienced differently by different groups of people. It can be a source of food, a place to work, an alienable commodity or an object of taxation (Li 2014). In the global scramble for resources and investment opportunities, land also becomes something to international institutions. In the context of the transformation of agriculture and resource extraction sites, the involvement of European Union (EU) financial and political institutions in land and resource governance increases as well. This can be observed in the Global Gateway Initiative, strategic independence discourses and a focus on resource investment policies. With regards to land "on the move" (Lazić/Kušić 2022), land frequently becomes an object of all shades of external governance. While many authors have focused on how land is conceptualized by those who lose it, less research has focused on how it is regarded by powerful actors who govern it, such as the EU. In this paper, we focus particularly on the EU’s external land politics, that is in its foreign policy, European neighbourhood approach, and accession processes. But how do these institutions themselves conceptualise this object of external governance? In turn, how do these imaginaries influence the way land is governed by these institutions? In this paper, we attempt to answer these questions by analysing official documents, speeches and other material that discusses land governance/policies, connecting them to political plans and outcomes in third countries. We analyse land-related statements by the European Investment Bank (EIB), the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) as well as the European Commission and the European Council as case studies. We show that these different EU institutions work with contradictory imaginaries of land. This finding can partly explain erratic policies in regard to land and resource governance in third countries. Analysing these contradictions in further depth, our research adds to the complexity of EU external actorness by showing that the EU can rarely be conceptualised as a single coherent actor but needs to be acknowledged as a) a complex political system that nevertheless b) steers and prefigures the conduct of others.