Despite the widespread narrative that, in the age of financialized capitalism, the state has been rolled back, with its remnants somewhat helplessly watching how restless capital hops from place to place, it still plays an important role in the regulation of foreign direct and portfolio investments into agriculture and other domains. The regulatory capacity of the state is, of course, highly uneven, but, more importantly, it appears in varied and sometimes surprising ways. In many countries the state has been central in giving rise to the asset management industry that we know, and the capital flows the latter administers cannot be thought of without the productive powers of the former (Bryan & Rafferty 2017). To name but a few examples: state regulation deeply shapes the fiduciary and delegation practices underpinning global investment chains; the state often acts as a grantor of land and the property rights that are so central to the making of institutional landscapes inside and outside agriculture (Wolford et al. 2013); and state regulation also shapes how much value can be extracted from agricultural labour and nature, and how much of this is being redistributed domestically as part of taxation arrangements. Others have gone even further, to argue that the state is a way of organizing nature in and of itself (Parenti 2016). Although financiers may encounter the state acting in ways palatable to their own activities (e.g. the existence of freehold land, such as in Aotearoa New Zealand), in other cases state power is less supportive of the quest for assetization (e.g. in countries with land tenure systems without freehold, such as Tanzania and Ghana).

Nevertheless, even in cases where agrarian structures on the ground are less favourable for the production of institutional landscapes, the state remains the major clearing house for capital (Green 1987). Theoretically, the data produced during the clearing process can be harnessed to make claims about both the actor networks behind global financial flows and the asset landscapes they produce, but the quality of such information depends on the state's capacity and willingness to record such information in the first place.