ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the concept of landesque capital becomes a stronger and sharper analytical tool when it is identified as a dynamic social relationship rather than a static landscape feature. In brief, the accumulated technomass of a capitalist system drunk on fossil fuels is now competing with the earth's biomass for living space and resources. The term capital seems to have escaped its moorings in classical economics, in which it is one of the factors of production along land and labor. Elizabeth Watson's work on terracing in southern Ethiopia, for example, shows that even a socially horizontal and largely egalitarian system of landesque capital requires analysis of the socially vertical dimensions of management, authority, and legitimacy. In the 1990s the Traditional Irrigation Improvement Programme (TIP) sought to revive the North Pare irrigation system. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, the government of independent Tanzania became increasingly coercive in its efforts to boost agricultural production while also pursuing African socialism.
