In recent decades, large-scale land acquisitions have increased to meet global food, energy, industry, climate protection, conservation, and urban expansion demands. Analyses of their negative impacts have led actors within and outside of academia to label this phenomenon as “land grabbing”. Existing academic literature on land grabs has traditionally used case-study approaches to form in-depth understandings of related impacts and land use change mechanisms. Recent meta-studies have synthesized findings across case-study evidence to draw broader examinations of case-study results. However, few have emphasized assessing the overall impact that land grabs may have on vulnerable populations and their surrounding environments. This article fills the gap in the existing literature by evaluating land grab case studies through the lens of environmental justice. Informed by four commonly emphasized components of environmental justice – distributive, procedural, corrective, and social justice- 94 selected cases were coded based on acquisition purpose, changes in environment and livelihood conditions, consultation processes, property rights, compensation, and stakeholder composition. Findings from this meta-synthesis study reveal how land grabbing processes are contributing to injustices across all four evaluative parameters of environmental justice. This paper concludes with a call for more structured research designs which incorporate environmental justice as an evaluative parameter.
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