Analyze

Interestingly you point out the linear (seeing from the State) vs nonlinear (seeing from the community) dimension. Comparing to Singapore, where government has more authority and coherent plan on urban planning, the Naluwan's experience seems to suggest a different form of governance between the government and the local society. In your prompts, you mentioned Singaporean government's urban planning to create fair housing, greeneries, as well as ethnic policies on promoting integration. I am curious about how you would describe "the sense of community and place" constructed by the top-down authority, comparing to the disordered, spontanious, bottom-up self-assembly mode we saw in Naluwan

This text builds from earlier conceptions of the term “land dispossession” and “land grab”. As defined by the 2011 International Land Coalition, land grabbing specifically refers to large scale land acquisitions that are “ in violation of human rights, without prior consent of the preexisting land users, and with no consideration of social and environmental impacts”. Characterization of land grabs and their resulting harms most commonly considers the effect of physical displacement and harms within the articulated “grabbed” area (Nyantakyi-Frimpong, 2017;Ogwand, 2018;  huaserman, 2018). Li and Pan seek to expand the frame of analysis for land grabs beyond the site of grabbed land to consider the full extent of harms associated with land grabs both geographically (via pollution spillover to areas outside of “grabbed land”) and temporally (via latent “expulsion by pollution). 

 “While the villagers are not passive victims and have adopted various resistance strategies, the space for them to struggle and achieve success is confined and shaped by the existing power asymmetry in which local villagers, capital and local government are embedded.”  (Li and Pan, 2021, p 418). 

“...this framing of land dispossession is problematic in two aspects. Firstly, it obscures an invisible form of land dispossession in which people still maintain control of their land but its use value is damaged by pollution. This kind of indirect land dispossession could lead to expulsion, not due to the direct loss of control over land but by it being rendered useless by pollution.” Li and Pan, 2021, p 409). 

 This text employs a case study approach to characterize how villagers in a village in China have been displaced “in-place” as a result of new industrial activities within the area  (all specific details have been hidden within the publication, wherein the names of villager groups and the site of study itself is referenced only by coded letters). The scale of analysis primarily centers at the village level, though analysis of the case study itself extends towards the country level specifically when analysis of state actors are involved. 

Authors Hua Li and Lu Pan are scholars from China. Li is  affiliated with the College of Humanities and Law at Taiyuan University of Technology, wherein her research focuses specifically on water politics, environmental justice, and rural development and agrarian change. Pan is affiliated with the College of Humanities and Development at China Agricultural University. Her research interests include marginalized communities, rural development, and agrarian change.

This concluding quote really summarizes the position of this article: "No one expects or requires major companies to take extraordinary measures to help their many stakeholders, but the bold and creative steps they take today to deliver immediate assistance will define their legacy tomorrow."

The author is managing director of FSG, a global social-impact consulting firm. He is lauding how acts of un-mandated CSR like Johnson & Johnson's pulling Tylenol off shelves or his own company's sliding-scale pay-cuts instead of layoffs are still talked about and used as cases in business school. He is using the "business case for CSR" line of argument to encourage companies to take steps such as giving their employees loans at a lower or no-interest rate, or doing the equivalent of "buying gift cards" from small suppliers. These actions, which don't even require any loss from the corporation, are portrayed as providing a huge boon to the company's reputation and employee loyalty, and still being above and beyond what is expected or mandated of corporations. 

The author opens with stating that the government's stimulus package is too little too late, which unfortunately is true, and then saying that the only option is for corporations to voluntarily engage in these primarily loan-based forms of assistance.