Guest blogpost by Holly Buck, Cornell University
"How do we know what we know?" asked Marc Edelman in a roundtable on methodologies, rounding off day 2 of the Global Land Grabbing Conference. Taking a historical perspective, Edelman pointed out that historical studies of land tenure show us numerous problems for measuring land: archaic units of contested sizes, antiquated surveying techniques, areas in titles that don't correspond to boundaries in reality, boundaries specified using markers that move, and a host of other practical challenges.
[...] Politics Initiative (LDPI)’s second international conference on ‘Global Land Grabbing’. A roundtable on the methodological challenges of researching the land rush interrogated the quality of the evidence base, and the multiple and not always converging purposes [...]