Transforming Land for Sustainable Food: Emerging contests to property regimes in capitalist heartlands

Recent ruptures over agricultural land use and agricultural policy in wealthy countries reveal the way entrenched norms of property limit the possibilities of food systems transformation. Debates about how to create sustainable food systems are dominated by a focus on the technical merits of differing visions of agricultural land use. While much needed policy proposals indicate the need for radical new land use change, land tenure or land governance is scarcely mentioned. Underwriting such debates are implicit assumptions about the nature of land relations. Such “land imaginaries” refer to the various ideas and societal understandings of what land is, and what it can, or should, do in society. We argue conflicts over the character of farming are more saliently understood as new disturbances to deeply entrenched patterns of land ownership and asset control. Disturbances that are only more likely as the ecological impacts of productivism are increasingly apparent. This framework paper showcases the need for property reform for sustainable food, evidence of its contestation, and theoretical entry points into future action amidst contexts where narrow visions of property appear as self-evident truths across legal, institutional and cultural norms. We first offer theoretical grounding that makes strange the concept of property, demonstrating an inherent tension between strong property entitlements and food system transformation. Here, we liken the assumed naturalness of property as hegemonic force, one that routinely manifests the broad consent to a set of rules that benefits the minority of land owning peoples. However, property is a strange form of hegemony, because its power is doubly vested in its embodied acceptance of its common sense as well as the coercive force that is ready to pounce on any challenge to its rule. What’s more, while property is strongly guided by mythos, narrative and norms, land is stubbornly material. This means that even powerful designs for how to discipline a flow of benefits through property often runs aground amidst thorny spatial contexts, creating a space for alternative politics to emerge. Having offered a narrative of how what property is and how it gets made, we turn to a set of institutional, legal, and cultural domains that demonstrate the capacity to make property anew. These domains match the lessons learned through emerging cases of actors practicing new culture, legal innovations, and mobilizing discourses to reshape land relations in order to produce a more sustainable food system.