Elaborating a human right to water in response to water grabbing is urgently needed. Water grabbing can be a powerful entry point for the contestation needed to build counterweights to the neoliberal, corporate business-led convergence in global resource governance discourses and processes. Yet, compared with land governance, global water governance is less contested from an equity and water justice perspective, even though land is fixed, while water is fluid and part of the hydrological cycle therefore water grabbing potentially affects greater numbers of diverse water users. For less powerful players resolving ambiguities in conflicting regulatory frameworks may require tipping the balance towards the most congenial. As in formal land management corporate influence has grown. Ambiguous processes of global water and land governance have increased local-level uncertainties and complexities that powerful players can navigate, making them into mechanisms of exclusion of poor and marginalised people. Formal law has been fostering both land and water grabs but formal water and land management have been separated from each other-an institutional void that makes encroachment even easier. Water grabbing takes place in a field that is locally and globally plural-legal. The contestation and appropriation of water is not new, but it has been highlighted by recent global debates on land grabbing. We found that the majority of the cases included in this analysis (44 of 56) could be examples of commons grabbing. Informed by political economy and political ecology approaches, we coded selected cases on the basis of acquisition mechanisms, claims and property rights, changes in production system, and coercive dynamics, and explored the interactions between the different variables using association tests and qualitative comparative analysis. We define the notion of “commons grabbing” and report on an exploratory study that applied meta-analytical methods, drawing from the recent literature on large-scale land acquisitions and land grabbing. In common-property systems, farmers and local users may be unable to defend their customary rights and successfully compete with external actors. While there is evidence that common-property systems have developed traditional institutions of resource governance that make them robust with respect to endogenous forces (e.g., uses by community members), it is less clear how vulnerable these arrangements are to exogenous drivers of globalization and expansion of transnational land investments. Here we argue that the contemporary global “land rush” could be happening at the expense of common-property systems around the world. In recent years, large-scale land acquisitions have drastically expanded it is unclear whether the commons are a preferential target of these acquisitions. Rural populations around the world rely on small-scale farming and other uses of land and natural resources, which are often governed by customary, traditional, and indigenous systems of common property. This bottom-up trends analysis broadly correlates with available accounts based on empirical research, while also providing distinctive emphases that reflect the ways practitioners perceive the changing realities they are engaged with. The findings point to the contrasting local-to-global trends that affect land governance in diverse agro-ecological and socio-economic settings: Growing commercial pressures on land, and shrinking spaces for dissent in many contexts, coexist with new avenues for public participation in land governance processes while diverse approaches to securing land rights, whether individual or collective, possibly underpinned by new deployments of digital technology, can coexist or compete for policy traction within the same polity. While not a comprehensive review nor a replacement for empirically grounded research, the study highlights some of the developments practitioners grapple with in their work. Drawing on written submissions made in response to an open call for contributions, the study discusses global trends in land governance over the period 2015–2018. This study presents findings from an initiative to test such an approach. While much research sheds light on key trends, questions remain about approaches for collective bottom-up analysis led by land governance practitioners themselves. An evolving land governance context compounds the case for practitioners to closely track developments as they unfold.
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