Clandestine and illicit economies as drivers of land system dynamics - Part A | 111RA | GLP OSM 2019

Organised by: Nicholas Magliocca & Elizabeth Tellman

04:50 | Nicholas Magliocca: NarcoLogic: Modeling cocaine traffickers and counterdrug interdiction forces as a complex adaptive system
29:38 | Elizabeth Tellman: Illicit-clandestine land transactions - linking pattern to process in Narcodeforestation
49:04 | Heidi Hausermann: From “handshakes” to Plasmodium falciparum: the relationships between illegal gold mining, landscape change and malaria in Ghana
1:12:44 | Irene Musselli, Elisabeth Bürgi Bonanomi: Illicit financial Flows as related to natural resources: Concepts and Definitions / or: Illicit financial flows as related to natural resources: legal or illegal?

The importance of clandestine and illicit economies as drivers of land system dynamics is becoming more widely recognized. Yet, causally linking these activities and their associated capital flows to land system state and transformation remain difficult, and challenges attempts to conceptualize, detect, and study clandestine and illicit economies as land system components comparable to legal economic activities. This research presentation session will delve into how clandestine and illicit transactions – i.e., economic/capital exchanges involving land that are intentionally hidden or non-public because they break formal laws – influence land system dynamics. From off-shore banking (revealed in the Panama Papers) to the international drug trade, large flows of clandestine financial capital around the world move through and embed in social and ecological domains of land systems. Clandestine capital may precipitate land-use transitions between forests and cattle ranches or mining operations, or from agriculture to urban uses. As agents possessing capital engage in political or economic rent-seeking and pursue private property arrangements, the new land markets and transactions that emerge may disrupt collective land tenure or governance structures. Of particular concern are the consequences to ecosystems and people further marginalized through these transactions that may either buttress or thwart sustainable development in the short and long term. While illegal logging and land grabbing have been prominent issues on the Land System Science agenda, more attention is needed to understand these and other types of clandestine activity on agricultural frontiers, in conflict and paramilitary zones, drug production and transit sites, and in informal urban settlements. This session will seek submissions that explore 1) how clandestine and illicit economies support or threaten land systems (OSM Theme 1), and/or 2) how Land System Science (LSS) perspectives and approaches can be used to gain insights into how clandestine and illicit economies operate (OSM Theme 3).

The 4th Open Science Meeting of the Global Land Programme was held from April 24-26 in Bern, Switzerland.

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