Introduction

This chapter explores the interface between co-produced research and community development, drawing on work undertaken in North East England as part of the Imagine project. Discussion of the process and outcomes of Imagine North East provides fruitful material for contributing to perennial debates about whether certain forms of co-produced research (especially participatory action research) are, in fact, indistinguishable from community development. In this chapter we offer a brief overview of the work of Imagine North East before outlining the debates about the relationship between co-production and community development. We then examine three elements of Imagine North East: (1) an academic-led study of community development from the 1970s to the present; (2) a series of community development projects undertaken by local community-based organisations; and (3) a joint process of reflection and co-inquiry. We consider the role of co-produced research in challenging stigma, celebrating place and developing skills and community networks, and also the challenges of a co-inquiry approach.

Exploring community development from the outside and inside: The work of Imagine North East

Imagine North East was a partnership between 12 community-based organisations in Tyneside (including a local museum) and Durham University, officially running during 2014 and 2015, with dissemination and reflection work continuing in 2016. Community development featured in several ways. Not only did community-based sub-projects use processes of community development (mobilising people to work together) and generate community development outcomes (for example, strengthened communities, improved facilities) in their work for Imagine North East, but our study also had community development as its main focus. We adopted three approaches to the study of community development, as outlined below:

• 1. Studying community development from the outside: The starting point of the research was the community development projects of the 1970s in Benwell (Newcastle-upon-Tyne) and North Shields. These were part of Britain's first anti-poverty programme, combining community development work and research with a view to diagnosing and alleviating poverty locally (Loney, 1983; Banks and Carpenter, 2017). We also looked at community development processes over time (from the 1970s to the present) as these areas were subject to numerous regeneration schemes in which local people were more or less engaged. This research was largely done by academic researchers and then shared in the wider group.

Africa is at the centre of a ‘global land grab’. This is what critics have named the rapid growth in land-based investments or land deals since 2007, a phenomenon unmatched since colonial times. By some estimates, 70 per cent of the land transacted in large-scale transnational deals in recent years has been in Africa, often considered the world's last reserve of unused and under-utilised fertile and irrigable farmland (Deininger et al. 2011; World Bank 2009). It is this potential that has lured investors motivated by projections of rising food prices, by growing demand for ‘green’ energy, and by the allure of cheap land and water rights. But governments have often allocated to investors land that is occupied, used, or claimed through custom by local people, resulting in disrupted livelihoods and even conflict.

The case studies presented in this book depict the striking diversity of such deals: white Zimbabwean farmers in northern Nigeria, Dutch and American joint ventures in Ghana, an Indian agricultural company in Ethiopia's hinterland, European investors in Kenya's drylands and a Canadian biofuel company on its coast, South African sugar agribusiness in Tanzania's southern growth corridor, in Malawi's ‘Greenbelt’ and in southern Mozambique, and white South African farmers venturing on to former state farms in Congo. In all cases, acquiring land is intimately linked to gaining access to water: land and water ‘grabbing’ are thus inseparable (Mehta et al. 2012; Woodhouse 2012).

The book explores the investors and their interests, the processes through which these land deals were concluded, and analyses their outcomes for changing agrarian structure, rural livelihoods and food security. Analysis of emerging patterns of social differentiation focuses attention on who wins, who loses out, and what new dynamics of accumulation and marginalisation result, both within directly affected communities and the broader society. The case studies also investigate the political and policy narratives through which these deals are justified and understood, the contested views of land and property that underpin them, and the degree to which new agrarian struggles are emerging in response.

After the term ‘land grabbing’ captured headlines around the world in the late 2000s, researchers embarked on a spate of new studies to understand this dramatic new trend. Africa was the focus, but in Southeast Asia and Latin America too, researchers and activists started to document large corporate takeovers of community and state land. A great deal of attention at this time revolved around how much land was being acquired, where, by whom and for what. All this was important and helped to sketch out the contours of a new era of agrarian restructuring.

The research reported in this book was conducted under the auspices of the Future Agricultures Consortium's land theme (www.futureagricultures. org/research/land). Centred on a network of Africa-based researchers, our studies set out to investigate what these ‘land grabs’ actually meant to the people directly affected. Our work from 2010 to 2014 investigated 13 cases across 8 countries in Africa.

Our interest in writing this book was to ground the narratives of a ‘land grab’ and of ‘agricultural investment’ in detailed local studies that would illuminate how these are experienced on the ground. What did these deals look like? Why did they happen in the particular places and at the particular times that they did? What transformations in rural people's lives and livelihoods were being produced? And what were the implications for future trajectories of agrarian change across the continent?

Across the studies, we chose to adopt a political economy perspective. We were motivated by a conviction that large-scale land deals in Africa must be understood in terms of the economic interests that animate national politics, and that such investments – many of which did not materialise in practice – were best understood at the intersection of global drivers and local institutions, mediated through national politics and economy. We asked: what political conditions enabled and promoted big land deals? How did investors come to identify certain sites? Who were their intermediaries? To what degree did national law and policy facilitate or shape the deals? And through what processes did local people engage with proposed deals, what were their responses, what happened to them and what did they do?

Introduction

In the tropical southern belt of the Republic of Congo, a group of South African commercial farmers have cleared trees and long elephant grass on some parts of their 50,000ha to commence large-scale production of maize. As this case shows, alongside the former colonial powers and Northern economies in the rush for African farmland is a new generation of investors from the ‘emerging economies’. Among these are the BRICS countries, including South Africa. Unlike China and Brazil which have launched bilateral partnerships with many African countries for technical assistance in agriculture, from India and South Africa the main actors are private companies that have secured deals with African governments, often in the form of long-term leases, to expand commercial farming operations in their countries. According to the Land Matrix (2014) database, South African companies have 28 large land deals either under negotiation or concluded in nine countries, with a total area of 679,262ha acquired in the deals concluded. Among these land deals involving South African investors is one brokered by the commercial farmers’ association, Agri South Africa (AgriSA), for 80,000ha of prime farmland in Congo's Niari province, about 200km inland from the port city of Pointe-Noire.

As with many large land acquisitions that are reported in the media, contradictions have emerged in the information regarding this investment. There have been significant discrepancies between ambitious announcements and the area of land actually provided under a legal agreement, and again between the land acquired and the area cleared and cultivated. The deal was initially mooted to involve 10 million hectares, the total area the government claimed was available for investors, but the contract, which was ultimately signed in 2011 by the government of the Republic of Congo and the South African farmers, concerns 80,000ha. The South African farmers initially occupied 50,000ha, with the other 30,000ha to be released by the Minister of Agriculture upon a satisfactory record of harvest. By 2013, only 2,500ha were under cultivation (Land Matrix 2014). But by 2014, three years after taking occupation, with over 5,000ha (10 per cent) under production and finally achieving successful harvests, the farmers reported that the government had released the further 30,000ha to them, on which they would expand in the future (Dirk Hanekom, head of AgriSA's Africa Policy Committee, on the South African television channel Kyknet, 2 October 2014).