Competition over Authority and Access: International Land Deals in Madagascar Perrine Burnod, Mathilde Gingembre and Rivo Andrianirina Ratsialonana ABSTRACT Despite the well-publicized abandonment of Daewoo Logistics’ gigantic agricultural project, large-scale land appropriations continue in Madagascar. Drawing on three case studies, this article analyses how relations between entities governing land access shape, and are shaped by, agribusiness-related land deals. State representatives and local elites generally welcome agribusi- ness investments but find themselves competing over the corresponding ben- efits and over land management more generally. In a context of legal plu- ralism, competition occurs between state officials, between state and local actors and also within the local arena. Both state and local elites may seek to reassert their authority by imposing new constraints on investors’ access to land. Within the state, officials draw on different legal provisions to im- pose new procedures on investors but rarely enforce the 2005 land laws that recognize local rights and decentralize land management. Within the local arena, some local leaders seize upon investors’ land claims to extend their territory at the expense of other communities, awakening or exacerbating local land conflicts. As a consequence, investors struggle to obtain land-use rights, whether legally formalized by state institutions or socially recognized by local entities, while the future of local land rights also remains uncertain. INTRODUCTION In November 2008, the Financial Times broke the story that secret negoti- ations were taking place between the Malagasy government and the South Korean company, Daewoo Logistics, to produce palm oil and corn for export on 1.3 million hectares (ha) of populated areas (Blas, 2008). In December 2008, just one month after the publication of the story, a political crisis erupted in the capital. Led by Andry Rajoelina, opponents of the Raval- omanana regime used the Daewoo case, among other scandals, as an il- lustration of the ways in which the President was stripping the country of its national resources and usurping Malagasy ancestral lands (Gingembre The authors wish to thank Ruth Hall, Wendy Wolford, Sara Keene and the anonymous referees for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article. Development and Change 44(2): 357–379. DOI: 10.1111/dech.12015 C  2013 International Institute of Social Studies. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA