Rethinking Transnational Farmland Grabbing in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: Toward a Systemic Conceptual Framework Articulating Propulsive and Stimulating Factors

Abstract

Large-scale land acquisitions, commonly referred to as land grabbing, have intensified since the early 2000s, generating profound disruptions to food security, land tenure systems, and rural livelihoods in low- and middle-income countries. Despite a growing body of literature, existing analyses remain predominantly discipline-bound and treat the determinants of land grabbing additively, without distinguishing the latent structural pressures that motivate investors from the institutional and policy conditions that actually permit acquisitions to occur. This study addresses that specific gap. It develops a hierarchical conceptual model that organizes the structural determinants of land grabbing into two functionally distinct categories -propulsive factors and stimulating factors -and formalizes their conditional, multiplicative interaction. The framework is built through a critical, integrative review of peer-reviewed and institutional literature (Scopus, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, Cairn and the grey-literature corpora of FAO, World Bank, IMF, Land Matrix, GRAIN and Oxfam, 2000-2025), screened against explicit relevance and quality criteria. The interaction is represented by a Cobb-Douglas-type activation function in which a weighted aggregate of five families of propulsive pressures (natural-demographic, economic, financial, geopolitical and green-finance) is multiplied by supply-side and demand-side stimulating conditions; the two elasticity parameters measure the responsiveness of land grabbing to institutional permissiveness and to exogenous investment incentives. A central theoretical proposition -the annihilation property -states that propulsive pressures remain latent whenever stimulating conditions are absent. We deliberately frame the model as a conceptual contribution: we propose, but do not yet estimate, a log-linear operationalization based on internationally standardized indicators, leaving empirical validation to future research. The principal contribution is the propulsive/stimulating distinction and its multiplicative formalization, which reconciles fragmented perspectives within a single testable architecture. Two implications follow: it identifies institutional vulnerability and exogenous incentives as the decisive activation levers, and it provides land-governance and food-security policy with a structured tool for targeting those levers.

JEL Classification: Q15; Q18; F21; O13.

Paper type: Theoretical Research.