Kei Otsuki
Biographic Data
| ID | 664652 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kei Otsuki |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kei |
| FAMILY NAME | Otsuki |
| SIGNATURE | OTSUKI K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Utrecht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1346-240X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 171 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The social lives of land , edited by Michael Goldman, Nancy Lee Peluso, and Wendy Wolford
Everyday land speculation without production in state-led urbanization
Indonesia’s new capital city construction is inducing state-led urbanization in the absence of private investments. Reports show the impacts of this process as a rapid land price increase and the government’s policy to control it. However, little is known about how the residents in surrounding settlements of the new city have extracted value from this process and the implication of these speculative activities for the state-led urbanization. Crit…
Reproducing Operational Landscapes
Indonesia's new capital city is designed to become a green and sustainable city. In this article, we examine the (un)sustainability of the process through which the city is coming into being. Using the sociospatial theory of planetary urbanization, we trace the dialectical relationship between the new city and sites beyond it to show how bringing a sustainable city into being in East Kalimantan requires other sites to become unsustainable. Throug…
Changing labour dynamics in the decarbonisation process in Mozambique’s coal frontier
Scholars argue that the rise of neoliberal mining and outsourcing has created a more fragmented working class and precarious working environment for mineworkers in the global South. Less examined is how climate change and the decarbonisation process have further restructured the labour dynamics. In the late 2000s, with the surge in global commodity prices, Tete province in Mozambique emerged as a coal frontier. However, long-established multinati…
Future-making beyond (im)mobility through tethered resilience
Power struggles
Among the considerable challenges many African utility companies and governments face in universalising electricity access are the economic losses and technical problems resulting from irregular practices of electricity access. Despite its concerted efforts, TANESCO—the Tanzania Electric Supply Company—is no exception to this. Against this backdrop, this study empirically investigates the tensions between energy access and cost recovery goals and…
River's End
This article analyzes the consequences of the state-led urbanization of riverine indigenous communities in Indonesia. Specifically, we examine how the development of urban water infrastructure in the context of the new capital city construction in East Kalimantan has changed indigenous relations with the river, and how this change further led to reconfigure indigenous people's relationship with their cultural heritage. Engaging with the political…
The Amazon’s road to growth? Infrastructural imaginaries of Brazil’s BR-319 Highway
In the Amazon, roads are closely intertwined with various social livelihood activities but also cause irreversible environmental destruction. As such, roads engender different infrastructural imaginaries of how economic growth should be pursued, signified and contested in rainforest landscapes. This paper focuses on infrastructural imaginaries of Brazil’s BR-319 Highway, an unfinished road that plunges through some of the best-preserved sections …
The making of H2-scapes in the Global South
Clean hydrogen is touted as a cornerstone of the global energy transition. It can help to decarbonize hard-to-electrify sectors, ship renewable power over great distances, and boost energy security. Clean hydrogen's appeal is increasingly felt in the Global South, where countries seek to benefit from production, export, and consumption opportunities, new infrastructures, and technological innovations. These geographies are, however, in the proces…
Seven reasons why climate-induced land grabbing requires significant changes in land governance
Contested values of development
This article examines how and why values are created and contested in the process of development, using an example of development-induced displacement and resettlement in Mozambique. It pays particular attention to the social-material effects of compensation, provided as cash, resettlement housing, replacement land, and basic infrastructure. Drawing from field research on an urban resettlement project of the Limpopo National Park in Massingir dis…
The role of the institutional environment in land use planning in Iran
The violence of involuntary resettlement and emerging resistance in Mozambique's Limpopo National Park
Nature conservation turns violent when it leads to enclosure, dispossession and militarisation, causing suffering among people living in the environment that is to be protected. Resettlement projects are meant to facilitate the process of repossession for dispossessed people as the proponents promise improved housing and physical infrastructure outside the protected area. While scholarly attention has been paid to the violence of dispossession, l…
The trajectory of extractive urbanism
Motivated by the increased demand for coal in the first decade of this century, multinational mining firms, including the Brazilian Vale, arrived in Tete province, Mozambique and expanded the coal frontier. The recent global agenda for energy transition made Vale decide to divest from Tete, selling all the mining-related assets to a new company, Indian Vulcan. This divestment is likely to lead to the restructuring of the expanded coal frontier an…
Learning from Africana critical theory
Over the past decade, Mozambique's liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in the province of Cabo Delgado has symbolized a new development opportunity for the country. The project attracted foreign investments to the province, and the national government has used it to showcase its progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. The project however also introduced various socioeconomic ills including the displacement of over 10,000 peo…
Enabling equitable energy access for Mozambique? Heterogeneous energy infrastructures in Maputo's growing urban periphery
This article concerns the relationship between uneven peri-urban growth and heterogeneous energy infrastructures in Metropolitan Maputo, Mozambique. Much research has documented how the diversity and overlap of different energy configurations define energy access in African cities. However, very little attention has been given to how urban growth dynamics shape heterogeneity and vice versa. A growing concern in African cities is highly uneven gro…
Exploring synergies between the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development and involuntary resettlement guidelines
This paper explores synergies between the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, comprised of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as its roadmap, and existing involuntary resettlement guidelines. On one hand, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development views displacement as a humanitarian problem but fails to address the potential effects of SDG-induced processes of economic and physical displacement and involuntary resettlement. On the oth…
Rethinking energy transitions in Southern cities
Despite increasing attention to the complex geographies of energy supply and use in Southern cities, energy research is still largely focusing on energy transitions evolving either through homogeneous, networked electricity or heterogeneous constellations in poor neighborhoods. Central to this research are analytical concepts used to explain energy transitions in Northern cities, such as the notion of socio-technical regimes. In this paper, we ar…
Translating the sustainable development goals in national development planning
The international community has emphasised the importance of governments adapting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to national policy priorities. Whilst sustainability assessment frameworks and indicators are meant to facilitate adaptation, their assumption of high institutional capacity based on Global North contexts is a shorthand for Global South contexts. In particular, limited institutional capacity means that electric…
Making Justice the Subject of Resettlement Planning
In development and conservation projects that induce displacement and resettlement, proponents increasingly focus on procedural justice. They assume that this focus leads to recognition of displaced people’s expressed needs and distributive justice. By critically applying Robert Lake’s conceptualisation of “justice as the subject of planning”, this paper examines ways the current framing of justice in resettlement planning assumes that justice is…
On whose land is the city to be built? Farmers, donors and the urban land question in Beira city, Mozambique
A new era of global interventionism in African cities is emerging, the implications of which for existing claims to urban space are poorly understood. This is particularly true for the claims of farmers. Despite being a ubiquitous feature of many African cities, urban agriculture broadly exists in a conceptual limbo between rurality and urbanity, largely invisible to urban governance and substantive scholarship. Based on the case of Beira, Mozamb…
Tackling challenges for co-management of natural resources
Mozambican law recommends community councils to promote the co-management of natural resources in protected areas. In the Limpopo National Park, the park committee has served as the community council for the last two decades. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2009–2019, this practical note identifies challenges that the committee faces and suggests two pathways to tackle the challenges: the committee members should be selected based on individual c…
Ostrom’s Governance Principles and Sustainable Financing of Fish Reserves
Previous studies on community-based natural resource management have repeatedly underlined the significance of the design principles for sustainable commons governance developed by Elinor Ostrom. In this paper, we apply the principles heuristically to the case of the Sikunga Channel Fish Protection Area (FPA), a recently established fish reserve in the Upper Zambezi in Namibia. Based on qualitative fieldwork including semi-structured household in…
Linking Individual and Collective Agency for Enhancing Community Resilience in Northern Ghana
This article aims to explore the relationship between individual adaptive actions and enhancement of community resilience to climate change as a communal objective. It proposes to pay attention to the concept of reflexivity as the primary individual capacity to link adaptive actions and community resilience. Drawing on the field research conducted in northern Ghana in 2015, this article specifically examines life histories of four small farmers a…
The Rush for Land in an Urbanizing World
The Rush for Land in an Urbanizing World
Addressing the impacts of large-scale land investments
After the consent
Rethinking energy transitions in Southern cities
Despite increasing attention to the complex geographies of energy supply and use in Southern cities, energy research is still largely focusing on energy transitions evolving either through homogeneous, networked electricity or heterogeneous constellations in poor neighborhoods. Central to this research are analytical concepts used to explain energy transitions in Northern cities, such as the notion of socio-technical regimes. In this paper, we ar…
Ecological rationality and environmental governance on the agrarian frontier
Seven reasons why climate-induced land grabbing requires significant changes in land governance
The violence of involuntary resettlement and emerging resistance in Mozambique's Limpopo National Park
Nature conservation turns violent when it leads to enclosure, dispossession and militarisation, causing suffering among people living in the environment that is to be protected. Resettlement projects are meant to facilitate the process of repossession for dispossessed people as the proponents promise improved housing and physical infrastructure outside the protected area. While scholarly attention has been paid to the violence of dispossession, l…
Procedural equity and corporeality
From land grabs to inclusive development
The making of H2-scapes in the Global South
Clean hydrogen is touted as a cornerstone of the global energy transition. It can help to decarbonize hard-to-electrify sectors, ship renewable power over great distances, and boost energy security. Clean hydrogen's appeal is increasingly felt in the Global South, where countries seek to benefit from production, export, and consumption opportunities, new infrastructures, and technological innovations. These geographies are, however, in the proces…
On whose land is the city to be built? Farmers, donors and the urban land question in Beira city, Mozambique
A new era of global interventionism in African cities is emerging, the implications of which for existing claims to urban space are poorly understood. This is particularly true for the claims of farmers. Despite being a ubiquitous feature of many African cities, urban agriculture broadly exists in a conceptual limbo between rurality and urbanity, largely invisible to urban governance and substantive scholarship. Based on the case of Beira, Mozamb…
Illegality in Settlement Heterotopias
It is often argued that various forms of illegality persist in the Brazilian Amazon because of weak frontier governance. However, very little is understood about how this governance can be strengthened in the context of social and spatial change in a way that will counter illegality. Drawing on the concept of heterotopias, as discussed by Michel Foucault, and the life history of an illegal logger in an agrarian reform settlement project in the st…
The Amazon’s road to growth? Infrastructural imaginaries of Brazil’s BR-319 Highway
In the Amazon, roads are closely intertwined with various social livelihood activities but also cause irreversible environmental destruction. As such, roads engender different infrastructural imaginaries of how economic growth should be pursued, signified and contested in rainforest landscapes. This paper focuses on infrastructural imaginaries of Brazil’s BR-319 Highway, an unfinished road that plunges through some of the best-preserved sections …
Contested values of development
This article examines how and why values are created and contested in the process of development, using an example of development-induced displacement and resettlement in Mozambique. It pays particular attention to the social-material effects of compensation, provided as cash, resettlement housing, replacement land, and basic infrastructure. Drawing from field research on an urban resettlement project of the Limpopo National Park in Massingir dis…
The role of the institutional environment in land use planning in Iran
Exploring synergies between the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development and involuntary resettlement guidelines
This paper explores synergies between the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, comprised of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as its roadmap, and existing involuntary resettlement guidelines. On one hand, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development views displacement as a humanitarian problem but fails to address the potential effects of SDG-induced processes of economic and physical displacement and involuntary resettlement. On the oth…
Translating the sustainable development goals in national development planning
The international community has emphasised the importance of governments adapting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to national policy priorities. Whilst sustainability assessment frameworks and indicators are meant to facilitate adaptation, their assumption of high institutional capacity based on Global North contexts is a shorthand for Global South contexts. In particular, limited institutional capacity means that electric…
Tackling challenges for co-management of natural resources
Mozambican law recommends community councils to promote the co-management of natural resources in protected areas. In the Limpopo National Park, the park committee has served as the community council for the last two decades. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2009–2019, this practical note identifies challenges that the committee faces and suggests two pathways to tackle the challenges: the committee members should be selected based on individual c…
River's End
This article analyzes the consequences of the state-led urbanization of riverine indigenous communities in Indonesia. Specifically, we examine how the development of urban water infrastructure in the context of the new capital city construction in East Kalimantan has changed indigenous relations with the river, and how this change further led to reconfigure indigenous people's relationship with their cultural heritage. Engaging with the political…
Learning from Africana critical theory
Over the past decade, Mozambique's liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in the province of Cabo Delgado has symbolized a new development opportunity for the country. The project attracted foreign investments to the province, and the national government has used it to showcase its progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. The project however also introduced various socioeconomic ills including the displacement of over 10,000 peo…
Making Justice the Subject of Resettlement Planning
In development and conservation projects that induce displacement and resettlement, proponents increasingly focus on procedural justice. They assume that this focus leads to recognition of displaced people’s expressed needs and distributive justice. By critically applying Robert Lake’s conceptualisation of “justice as the subject of planning”, this paper examines ways the current framing of justice in resettlement planning assumes that justice is…
Linking Individual and Collective Agency for Enhancing Community Resilience in Northern Ghana
This article aims to explore the relationship between individual adaptive actions and enhancement of community resilience to climate change as a communal objective. It proposes to pay attention to the concept of reflexivity as the primary individual capacity to link adaptive actions and community resilience. Drawing on the field research conducted in northern Ghana in 2015, this article specifically examines life histories of four small farmers a…
Ambiente global como mundos-da-vida
Arena da política ambiental foi dominado por duas forces opostas. Por um lado, ambientalistas exigiram conservação do meio ambiente incondicional, e por outro lado, desenvolvimentistas promoviram o desenvolvimento econômico através da exploração do meio ambiente. A normalização do conceito de desenvolvimento sustentável no final da década de 1980 abriu um novo espaço político nesta arena, na qual os decisores políticos e peritos começarom a enfat…
Ambiente global como mundos-da-vida
Arena da política ambiental foi dominado por duas forces opostas. Por um lado, ambientalistas exigiram conservação do meio ambiente incondicional, e por outro lado, desenvolvimentistas promoviram o desenvolvimento econômico através da exploração do meio ambiente. A normalização do conceito de desenvolvimento sustentável no final da década de 1980 abriu um novo espaço político nesta arena, na qual os decisores políticos e peritos começarom a enfat…
Sustainable Development Interfaces
Embora desenvolvimento sustentável tenha sido popularizado na Amazônia brasileira e a literatura sobre sua prática já seja abundante, pouco tem sido discutido sobre o que realmente acontece com a implementação dos projetos. Este artigo busca preencher esta lacuna utilizando a análise de interfaces, que permite ao analista examinar espaços criados através de interações entre os vários atores envolvidos no processo dos projetos de desenvolvimento s…
Reflexivity in Participatory Development
While international development experts increasingly consider participation to be a genuinely transformative approach to development, the process by which this transformation may take place as an outcome of the participatory development is not sufficiently understood. Drawing mainly on the works of Margaret Archer, this article proposes to elaborate a reflexivity-based framework as a tool to follow the potential transformative process taking plac…
Illegality in Settlement Heterotopias
It is often argued that various forms of illegality persist in the Brazilian Amazon because of weak frontier governance. However, very little is understood about how this governance can be strengthened in the context of social and spatial change in a way that will counter illegality. Drawing on the concept of heterotopias, as discussed by Michel Foucault, and the life history of an illegal logger in an agrarian reform settlement project in the st…
Ecological rationality and environmental governance on the agrarian frontier
Procedural equity and corporeality
After the consent
Linking Individual and Collective Agency for Enhancing Community Resilience in Northern Ghana
This article aims to explore the relationship between individual adaptive actions and enhancement of community resilience to climate change as a communal objective. It proposes to pay attention to the concept of reflexivity as the primary individual capacity to link adaptive actions and community resilience. Drawing on the field research conducted in northern Ghana in 2015, this article specifically examines life histories of four small farmers a…
The Rush for Land in an Urbanizing World
Addressing the impacts of large-scale land investments
From land grabs to inclusive development
Ostrom’s Governance Principles and Sustainable Financing of Fish Reserves
Previous studies on community-based natural resource management have repeatedly underlined the significance of the design principles for sustainable commons governance developed by Elinor Ostrom. In this paper, we apply the principles heuristically to the case of the Sikunga Channel Fish Protection Area (FPA), a recently established fish reserve in the Upper Zambezi in Namibia. Based on qualitative fieldwork including semi-structured household in…
Rethinking energy transitions in Southern cities
Despite increasing attention to the complex geographies of energy supply and use in Southern cities, energy research is still largely focusing on energy transitions evolving either through homogeneous, networked electricity or heterogeneous constellations in poor neighborhoods. Central to this research are analytical concepts used to explain energy transitions in Northern cities, such as the notion of socio-technical regimes. In this paper, we ar…
Translating the sustainable development goals in national development planning
The international community has emphasised the importance of governments adapting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to national policy priorities. Whilst sustainability assessment frameworks and indicators are meant to facilitate adaptation, their assumption of high institutional capacity based on Global North contexts is a shorthand for Global South contexts. In particular, limited institutional capacity means that electric…
Making Justice the Subject of Resettlement Planning
In development and conservation projects that induce displacement and resettlement, proponents increasingly focus on procedural justice. They assume that this focus leads to recognition of displaced people’s expressed needs and distributive justice. By critically applying Robert Lake’s conceptualisation of “justice as the subject of planning”, this paper examines ways the current framing of justice in resettlement planning assumes that justice is…
On whose land is the city to be built? Farmers, donors and the urban land question in Beira city, Mozambique
A new era of global interventionism in African cities is emerging, the implications of which for existing claims to urban space are poorly understood. This is particularly true for the claims of farmers. Despite being a ubiquitous feature of many African cities, urban agriculture broadly exists in a conceptual limbo between rurality and urbanity, largely invisible to urban governance and substantive scholarship. Based on the case of Beira, Mozamb…
Tackling challenges for co-management of natural resources
Mozambican law recommends community councils to promote the co-management of natural resources in protected areas. In the Limpopo National Park, the park committee has served as the community council for the last two decades. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2009–2019, this practical note identifies challenges that the committee faces and suggests two pathways to tackle the challenges: the committee members should be selected based on individual c…
The trajectory of extractive urbanism
Motivated by the increased demand for coal in the first decade of this century, multinational mining firms, including the Brazilian Vale, arrived in Tete province, Mozambique and expanded the coal frontier. The recent global agenda for energy transition made Vale decide to divest from Tete, selling all the mining-related assets to a new company, Indian Vulcan. This divestment is likely to lead to the restructuring of the expanded coal frontier an…
Learning from Africana critical theory
Over the past decade, Mozambique's liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in the province of Cabo Delgado has symbolized a new development opportunity for the country. The project attracted foreign investments to the province, and the national government has used it to showcase its progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. The project however also introduced various socioeconomic ills including the displacement of over 10,000 peo…
Enabling equitable energy access for Mozambique? Heterogeneous energy infrastructures in Maputo's growing urban periphery
This article concerns the relationship between uneven peri-urban growth and heterogeneous energy infrastructures in Metropolitan Maputo, Mozambique. Much research has documented how the diversity and overlap of different energy configurations define energy access in African cities. However, very little attention has been given to how urban growth dynamics shape heterogeneity and vice versa. A growing concern in African cities is highly uneven gro…
Exploring synergies between the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development and involuntary resettlement guidelines
This paper explores synergies between the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, comprised of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as its roadmap, and existing involuntary resettlement guidelines. On one hand, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development views displacement as a humanitarian problem but fails to address the potential effects of SDG-induced processes of economic and physical displacement and involuntary resettlement. On the oth…
The role of the institutional environment in land use planning in Iran
The violence of involuntary resettlement and emerging resistance in Mozambique's Limpopo National Park
Nature conservation turns violent when it leads to enclosure, dispossession and militarisation, causing suffering among people living in the environment that is to be protected. Resettlement projects are meant to facilitate the process of repossession for dispossessed people as the proponents promise improved housing and physical infrastructure outside the protected area. While scholarly attention has been paid to the violence of dispossession, l…
Contested values of development
This article examines how and why values are created and contested in the process of development, using an example of development-induced displacement and resettlement in Mozambique. It pays particular attention to the social-material effects of compensation, provided as cash, resettlement housing, replacement land, and basic infrastructure. Drawing from field research on an urban resettlement project of the Limpopo National Park in Massingir dis…
Future-making beyond (im)mobility through tethered resilience
Political science (25 works) · Economics (21 works) · Geography (21 works) · Economic growth (14 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Environmental planning (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management (8 works) · Ecology (8 works)