Capitalizing on Land – Negotiating Resources and Policies: A Discourse Study of Land Use and Land Ownership in Four Policy Fields in Uganda

The potential of land capitalization and negotiation of policy highlights the space where language and discourse are mapped and ascribed as the power of governing both as discursively constructed and hierarchically governed in the extractive industries. This remains the central policy problem for achieving the social order in a late capitalist economy like Uganda. The point of tensions are the complexities which have to be identified as the missing link in public policy in terms of the interconnectedness that has so far been taken for granted by the state and non-state field actors in the unsettled social complex system. The introduction of policy fields is one way of promoting critical stance in the field of policy studies to explain and interpret the complexity that characterizes the use and possession of land in the four policy areas in Uganda: agriculture, oil and gas, hydropower and tourism through the practice of negotiating resources of great importance to the current social order, the Vision 2040. Each policy field has a porous boundary which endures human actors to interact within and in other proximate fields. This thesis applies field theory to policy studies (i.e. critical policy discourse analysis) through comparative approach across the four policy fields to identify discursive struggles and hegemonic institutional practices from an inter-disciplinary perspective.