Beyond the Binary of Formal and Informal: Negotiating Hybrid Land Control by Chinese Banana Entrepreneurs in Laos

ABSTRACT As transnational land investments continue to expand across the Global South, land governance in many settings is shifting from largely informal arrangements towards greater formalization. However, we know less about how entrepreneurs sustain and rework land control as host states tighten regulation and introduce new formal requirements and how these requirements are implemented in practice. To address this gap, drawing on Chinese banana investments in Laos, this study provides a process‐based account of how entrepreneurs' land control evolves and is reconfigured during shifts towards more formal regulation. Based on 8 months of fieldwork with three case companies, the results reveal how entrepreneurs respond to regulatory bans and navigate tighter land governance by deploying flexible strategies to maintain land control. Such strategies include brokerage via land middlemen, relational embedding with state authorities and tactical negotiation within bureaucratic ambiguity. These findings emphasize that, while land governance moves towards formalization, fragmented governance leaves informal ties and interactions embedded in the implementation of formal requirements and the exercise of administrative discretion, producing hybrid forms of land control. By tracing how these hybrid arrangements evolve over time, the study moves beyond the formal and informal binary and offers a process‐based account of how land control is sustained and reworked under tightening regulation. This study also contributes to debates on land politics and governance in the Global South by showing how the evolving dynamics of land control enable transnational investments to influence institutional practices and agrarian change.