Dear Colleagues,

Over the past two decades, there has been an increasing convergence of multiple global crises around food, energy, environment, climate change, and finance. This contemporary convergence of multiple crises has triggered profound global agrarian and environmental transformations, which have, in turn, entailed far-reaching implications for various social classes and groups in the rural world. The responses to the crises are multiple and distinct. The dominant response to these converging crises is capitalism’s relentless search for more opportunities from these crises, which are its own creation, to make more profits out of them. Contemporary land grabs are a capitalist response to the convergence of crises in which corporations seek to acquire control of more natural resources such as land, water, forests, and minerals to turn them into profitable use. Such resource grabs and the ensuing transformations have provoked widespread reactions ‘from below’ and from state actors.

The politics of natural resources, i.e., “who gets which natural resources, how, how much, why, for what purposes and with what implications?” have been transformed. While there are continuities from the past in terms of appropriate governance response to the contemporary challenges, there are clear changes as well—principally brought about by the era of climate change politics, and increasingly reshaped in the context of the rise of various strands of populism and authoritarianism in various parts of the world today.

In view of this, for this Special Issue, we are interested in original contributions dealing with the changing character of the politics of natural resources—land, water, forests, and minerals—examined in the context of converging issues of global resource rush, climate change, and populism. We would like to receive contributions with a special emphasis on the rise of agro-extractivism, land grabbing, climate change mitigation and adaptation and on the various forms of political reactions by different social classes and groups towards dynamic changes in the political economy of natural resources.

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Land is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• agro-extractivism
• land grabbing
• climate change mitigation and adaptation