This Joint study group with the Development Studies Association of the UK was conceived to have scope to engage with policy makers and land, professionals, and to inform development policy and practice on land, and potentially can also provide a platform for collaborative research and publications amongst based researchers dispersed across multiple institutions in UK and internationally and others from the global South. 

Central concerns for the study group convenors are with the political economy and political ecology of land, and labour; how the evolution of land institutions and tenure, and labour regimes relations is shaped by power in society; and in understanding the distributional outcomes of land and labour policies, interventions and governance arrangements, as well as their environmental consequences and overall sustainability. Research on land and labour policy & law, land, labour, capital & development trajectories, land rights formalisation, customary tenure systems, land & investment, land, labour, race, class & gender, land, labour & accumulation, capital and social reproduction, natural resource tenure & landscape governance, and impacts of land tenure and reform programmes all falls within the scope, but geographical and thematic focus topics are driven by members’ interests, and research papers put forward for discussion they may have to share.

Core Topics:

• Rural-Urban land relations
• Rural-Urban labour relations 
• Rural-Urban Migration
• Agrarian crises and their political and policy implications 
• Social reproduction and non-reproduction
• Capitalism (including racial capitalism)
• Sustainability and Climate Change 
• Food sovereignty and food security
• Food and labour regimes
• Global value chains and production networks 
• Feminist Political Economy Analyses
• Feminist Political Ecology Analyses