Shared assets: inclusiveness, agroecology and municipal ownership in land use.
| Author | Swade, Kate |
| Position | FOOD AND FARMING |
The countryside is having a moment in the policy spotlight. Our departure from the EU, the pandemic-induced interest in rural living and the climate crisis are all putting more focus on our rural areas. Yet, as the Royal Society says, recent policy commitments around net zero, the national nature recovery plan and the national food strategy represent 'a range of competing and sometimes contradictory demands on agricultural land use'. (1)
Decisions made now and in the next few years about rural policy will define the future of the country as a whole. When we talk about rural policy, we are mainly talking about land use policy, much of which is nationally set. What's often overlooked in these discussions, however, is the role of local authorities, both as landowners and enablers of change in their local areas. I argue that local authorities should be a focus of rural policy, and that they should be empowered to use their assets and influence to build a new rural municipalism.
First, though, we have to unpick some underlying assumptions around the way we think about land.
Reimagining land
Land is a funny thing. On the one hand, it's plainly obvious what it is: the tangible stuff underneath all our feet, the thing 'they're not making anymore', as the oft-quoted Mark Twain is alleged to have said. On the other hand, land, and especially the ownership of land - when it almost magically converts into 'property' - is a deep abstraction, a legal concept that brings with it huge power.
You can own land without ever having set foot on it. Trade it without it ever moving. And when you think about it, that's a deeply strange concept - and one that is comparatively recent in human history. It's also very culturally specific. As Andro Linklater says in his magisterial book, Owning the Earth:
Most inhabitants of the Western world live in a private property society and are consequently prejudiced in its favour. But across the globe people have evolved myriad means of owning the places they live in... The differences affect the way we look at ourselves and the world. (2) At Shared Assets, the social enterprise I co-direct, we work to reimagine what we can do with land together. We support models of land use, stewardship and governance that create shared, common, benefits, as opposed to private benefits. We work with landowners, community groups, councils and researchers who work with land in ways that are simultaneously pioneering and inventive, and also deeply rooted in community as well as more ancient knowledge: they run community-owned farms and cooperative forestry enterprises; they create mutual and collective approaches to animating parks and public spaces; and they reinvigorate old infrastructure to meet twenty-first century challenges.
Almost all of them are butting up against the concept of land as property, and the capitalist logic that that entails.
Despite the vibrancy of this emerging sector of common good land stewards, we have always struggled to talk about 'land' as a general concept, especially to people who aren't working with it. The slipperiness of the idea of land both as a tangible thing and an abstraction - as property - partly contributes to this, but we wanted to explore it further.
In November, we therefore published a report with the Future Narratives Lab, Power in Place, exploring the dominant narratives about land in UK contemporary culture. (3) In essence, we found an underlying narrative that centres the active role and voice of some groups (such as landowners, property developers and homeowners) at the expense of others (including tenants, travellers, young people, landworkers, people of colour), whom the narrative treats as passive or absent.
Through workshops and media analysis, we identified five frames through which narratives justify the land system as the natural, finished outcome of historical processes - 'it's just the way things are'. That leaves us all facing a system where land is perceived to be scarce, and the only realistic way to find security is to join the scramble to compete for ownership, which is in turn perceived to offer control. This framing then implies that any change to the system is either dangerous and destabilising, or unrealistic and utopian. At the heart of this framing is a sense that land is vulnerable to people. It also embodies deeply held values around power, wealth and freedom.
In our current system, land is too often treated as a resource to be exploited, to be used as intensively as possible, whether in new urban developments or industrial farming. For local authorities, it is commonly seen purely as an asset on the balance sheet that can be sold off. If it is not a resource, then it is something to be conserved and protected, often frozen - like many of our national parks - at a particular, arbitrary moment in time. This way of thinking is particularly apparent in the recent planning 'reforms'; it underpins a lot of recent policy and betrays a deeper worldview.
Two worldviews
There's another binary that comes up when thinking and talking about land and the environment: land-sharing vs land-sparing. Fred Pearce clarifies:
It is one of the biggest questions in conservation: Should we be sharing our landscapes with nature by reviving small woodlands and adopting small-scale eco-friendly farming? Or should we instead be sparing large tracts of land for nature's exclusive use - by...
To continue reading
Request your trialCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
