Abstract :
[en] Rural areas face huge transformations due to driving forces that are mainly on the international or global scale. Local populations are required to adapt to maintain their livelihood but are often obliged to migrate or to undertake radical transformations that alter their lifestyles, including their agricultural practices (Barcus et al., 2022). This process questions territorial sovereignty, as well as the freedom of present and future generations to choose how they will manage the local environment and its resources. Transformations often occur as a result of land grabbing, which occurs when companies, governments, or wealthy individuals buy and divert land from small scale land owners for their agenda. One variation of this process is green grabbing (Fairhead et al., 2012), when the appropriation of land and resources is specifically for supposed environmental ends.
In many places around the world, other grabbing mechanisms occur when people are obliged to change their land use practices, thus altering the landscape. This leads to feelings of expropriation and abuse through a variety of financial, legal, cultural, physical, mental and environmental pressures. The series of rapid land use changes which are linked to development strategies, policies based on utilitarian and competitive logic, the privatization of public places and commons, commodification and large-scale production models, but also environmental regulations, affect people’s sense of place. The land grabbing concept is not adequate to describe the observed phenomenon, and thus, Ciervo and Cerreti (2020) suggested using the concept “landscape grabbing”. Based on the draft concept presented in Geotema, this paper aims to scrutinize both the landscape and political geography literature to assess the interest of this concept within the conceptual map of the geographical research and points out the interest of this approach to better understand rural areas and reflect on their sustainability.
