Wartime Violence and Post-Conflict Development Policy: The Case of Agricultural Concessions in Mozambique

Topher McDougal () and Raul Caruso ()

No 1/2013, NEPS Working Papers from Network of European Peace Scientists

Abstract: Widely hailed as a paragon of successful post-conflict development policy, the Government of Mozambique has focused its economic aspirations on the promise of biofuel exports over the past decade. It has made hundreds of agricultural concessions to corporations in the biofuels industry. However, this land use competes with pre-existing local claims on arable land and water resources, possibly heightening food insecurity in rural areas. In response, local groups have sought to oppose the concessions, thus securing their land grants. We investigate whether the magnitude and recentness of wartime violence influence the success of communities in opposing agricultural concessions and securing community land grants. We test this and two alternative hypotheses with districtlevel data on biofuels concessions, recognized community landholdings, and civil war events generated in a geographic information system. Controlling for demographic, geographic, and market access factors, we find that while the recentness of violence may actually galvanize community cohesion and reinvigorate local institutional capacity, the intensity of violence plays a more nuanced role, associated, as it is, with higher levels of both corporate concessions (locally undesirable) and community land grants (locally desirable). We suggest that these findings are consistent with the idea that violence heightens community cohesion, but degrades connections between the local and national levels.

JEL-codes: D74 N47 N57 O13 O25 Q15 Q16 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2013-01-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-agr and nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.europeanpeacescientists.org/1_2013.pdf Full text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.europeanpeacescientists.org/1_2013.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.europeanpeacescientists.org/1_2013.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:nepswp:2013_001

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NEPS Working Papers from Network of European Peace Scientists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vincenzo Bove ().