The Commons in a Glocal World

16Gendered impacts and coping strategies in the case of a Swiss bioenergy project in Sierra Leone

Franziska Marfurt

Introduction

The food, finance and fuel crisis of 2007–2008 triggered a sharp increase in land investment in the Global South, and in the process sparked the interest of journalists, academia and the wider public alike. Although research on different aspects of large-scale land acquisitions (LSLA) increased, data regarding concrete processes at the community level have remained sparse. This paper builds on ethnographic fieldwork and addresses the local impacts of a large bioenergy project in Sierra Leone. The investor is a Swiss-based bioenergy company that leased 57,000 hectares of land for the production and export of biofuel ...