Ethnography of a Land-Deal. Local Perceptions and Vertical Perspectives of a Large Scale Land Acquisition Project in Northern Sierra Leone

Käser, Fabian; Marfurt, Franziska; Lustenberger, Samuel (6 September 2014). Ethnography of a Land-Deal. Local Perceptions and Vertical Perspectives of a Large Scale Land Acquisition Project in Northern Sierra Leone (Unpublished). In: 8th European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference. University of Glasgow. 06.09.2014.

Official URL: http://www.ecpr.eu

In the aftermath of the devastating civil war, the Sierra Leonean government created favourable conditions for foreign investors willing to lease large areas of land to bring development to the country.
A team of anthropologists and geographers did extensive fieldwork on the Addax Bioenergy Project in order to a) document the project affected people’s (PAP) perceptions and interests on a horizontal level and b) identify the different actors that are necessary for the implementation of such a project on the vertical level.
Findings indicate that the project triggers a number of processes: Cultural and linguistic differences between PAP and company, their diverse understanding of development and the stance of local elites led to misunderstandings concerning each other’s responsibilities and created a lot of frustration on both sides. Further, the loss of natural resources that comes along with the land lease affects mostly women and other vulnerable groups.

Item Type:

Conference or Workshop Item (Speech)

Division/Institute:

06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Art and Cultural Studies > Institute of Social Anthropology

UniBE Contributor:

Käser, Fabian David

Subjects:

300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology
500 Science > 550 Earth sciences & geology

Language:

English

Submitter:

Fabian Käser

Date Deposited:

12 May 2015 10:20

Last Modified:

02 Mar 2023 23:26

Uncontrolled Keywords:

Large scale land acquisitions; local perception; social anthropology; development; gender; network

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/68441

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