Concessionaires, Financiers and Communities
Implementing Indigenous Peoples' Rights to Land in Transnational Development Projects

The untold story of how concessionaires, financiers and hidden private legal devices, implement and shape Indigenous peoples' rights to land.

Kinnari I. Bhatt (Author)

9781108484657, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 March 2020

222 pages, 3 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.6 cm, 0.44 kg

'Bhatt's unique book offers a powerful double-edged sword to the literature on transnational economic law, laying detailed empirical siege on the orthodoxies which fortify the fields of both private commercial law and public international law in the process … Concessionaires, Financiers and Communities offers a wealth of insight into the real world machinations of capital, law and the social impacts of development projects. The conceptual implications of this largely empirically-focused book for the field of transnational law are also significant, and it has catalysed wider conversations within the field about the impact of private actors on the rule of law … The book's exceptional integrity and faithfulness to the real-world dimensions of transnational law, however, is itself a conceptual and methodological contribution.' Jennifer R. Lander, Social and Legal Studies

Unrelenting demands for energy, infrastructure and natural resources, and the need for developing states to augment income and signal an 'enterprise-ready' attitude mean that transnational development projects remain a common tool for economic development. Yet little is known about the fragmented legal framework of private financial mechanisms, contractual clauses and discretionary behaviours that shape modern development projects. How do gaps and biases in formal laws cope with the might of concessionaires and financiers and their algorithmic contractual and policy technicalities negotiated in private offices? What impacts do private legal devices have for the visibility and implementation of Indigenous peoples' rights to land? This original perspective on transnational development projects explains how the patterns of poor rights recognition and implementation, power(lessness), vulnerability and, ultimately, conflict routinely seen in development projects will only be fully appreciated by acknowledging and remedying the pivotal role and priority enjoyed by private mechanisms, documentation and expertise.

1. Development projects, Indigenous peoples' land rights and rights implementation
2. Characteristics of indigenous peoples and development projects
3. In the shadows of the operational development project: coping strategies, lacunas and fragmentation in the formal legal framework
4. Bridging the gap through the elephant in the room? Private mechanisms and behaviours for implementing Indigenous peoples' rights
5. Discretion, delegation, fragmentation and opacity: impacts of financing mechanisms in Mongolia and Panama
6. Pricing for poverty: project finance, power purchase agreements and structural inequities in Uganda
7. Negotiating land outcomes: a comparative look at concessionaires, Indigenous peoples and power
8. Moving forward.

Subject Areas: Public international law [LBB], Human rights [JPVH], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC]