Who owns the Earth? A challenge for the land system science community

ABSTRACT

Reflecting on the 2019 Open Science Meeting of the Global Land Program and on commentaries since, we argue that the time is ripe for the land system science community to fully embrace the thorny issue of land ownership and control. Beyond land governance and institutions, the issue of who actually owns and controls land, and how land holding and rents are distributed across society, is central to the future of sustainability initiatives, biodiversity protection, social justice, climate change mitigation, and long-term food security and sovereignty. By explicitly tracking and visualizing just Who Owns the Earth, the land system science community could provide much-needed data and insights to inform public debate and advance political action in these arenas.

KEYWORDS:

• Land ownership
• land control
• land markets
• land rents
• land access

Introduction

The recent Open Science Meeting of the Global Land Program (GLP-OSM) – a gathering of the world’s land system scientists – was the most vibrant conference we have attended in recent years, with high-quality presentations and stimulating discussions. There was an inspiring array of themes and approaches, some addressing the classic problems of land system science, others branching out into issues of equity and social justice. The thematic and methodological effervescence at GLP-OSM was matched by a palpable multi-generational dynamism and an energizing diversity of participants, both in terms of disciplinary training and of ethnicity, gender, and nationality. The event was animated by calls to make our science more relevant and amenable for uptake by policy makers, social advocates and the general public. Such impressions from the conference have since been echoed by commentators on the GLP-OSM blog and in a recent special issue in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability (Chowdhury et al., 2019). Clearly, the land system science community is poised to contribute in exciting new ways to address some of the world’s most pressing social and environmental challenges.

The field of land system science was originally conceived to address the phenomenon of global land cover/land use change. An initial goal was to generate a synoptic understanding of how the earth’s landscapes were changing. Developing synergistically with innovations in remote sense, data processing, and GIS, the land system science community has met that challenge while providing crucial insights into trajectories of land change at multiple scales, the often teleconnected drivers of such change, and how those changes articulate with biogeochemical processes. Land system scientists now contribute to major debates on sustainability, agriculture and food security, ecosystem services, global health, and much more (see also De Bremond et al., 2019; Future Earth, 2020).

So where do we go from here? While land system science is clearly thriving, there is a palpable sense that the upwelling of interest and capacities apparent at GLP-OSM Bern have yet to coalesce firmly in new collective challenges – new research frontiers focused around matters of shared scientific and societal concern (see also Nielsen et al., 2019). We propose here that the provocative rhetorical question – Who Owns the Earth ? – represents just such a frontier; that the pursuit of this question would launch the land system field into a new and influential era of policy-relevant, cutting-edge research. Below, we make our case by asking: a) why this question matters; b) why we as a scientific community are ready and able to tackle it; c) what this question will require of us; and, d) where it might lead us.

But first, a note about the phrasing of the question, Who Owns the Earth. Although we envision a research agenda that can encompass all aspects of Earth – urban and rural land, water, sub-surface and above-ground natural resources – for brevity and concision we confine the rest of this brief 'Debate' to the Earth’s land surface, with a focus on the non-urban. Also: while the question presumes a focus on ‘ownership,’ we acknowledge ‘control’ as a term that better encompasses the outcome of many different forms of property rights and access.

Why land ownership and control matter

A vast and deep scientific literature has long demonstrated and theorized the inescapable importance of land control and land distribution – and the struggle over both – to the fate of human societies; the issue is a central concern of political-economic thought. In global rural and and natural-resource contexts, the topic is particularly well-studied in the fields of agrarian studies, development studies, agricultural economics, rural sociology and political ecology. This disciplinary range reflects the fact that land has many valences: it is central to social identities and geopolitical regimes; it is fundamental to food provisioning and thus to human reproduction; and it is the most valuable financial asset in the world.

The Great Recession of 2007–08 catalyzed renewed scholarly and popular attention to global patterns of land control and land inequality more generally. In talk after talk at the GLP-OSM meeting in Bern, presenters described trends in which those years were a crucial inflection point. As at other historical moments when interest rates are low, when there is high volatility in stock markets, and when political uncertainty prevails, those with capital buy land for security and speculation. As a result, the past decade-plus has seen land as an asset class drawing increasing interest from new sets of social actors, including hedge fund and pension managers, mining and energy conglomerates, agrifood multinationals, drug cartels, and kleptocrats. These actors are intensifying land privatization trends set in motion at the start of the neoliberal era through transnational land investments and land transfers that transform smallholding, commons, and public forms of land to fee simple ownership (i.e., ‘private property’) often held by absentee corporate entities (see, e.g., Christophers, 2018; Guereña, 2016). Shifts in land ownership and land distribution, in turn, portend often dramatic changes in land use and land cover, playing out through the multiple and complex pathways that link land change to people, culture, livelihoods, poverty and technology (see, e.g., Magliocca et al., 2019).

Not only are new and old players buying up land everywhere, but they are doing so at an accelerating rate – thus the widespread use of the term ‘land grabbing.’ The pace of land transfers has caught analysts off-guard, complicating policy prescriptions for land management under climate change, for long-term food security planning, and for developing fiscal arrangements that ensure equitable distribution of land rents into the future. Land transfers are also picking up pace as investor-led pressures build to open up ‘frontier’ spaces for industrial-scale resource extraction, and as nation-states are fiscally incentivized to release lands once considered inviolate, including protected areas (Kroner et al., 2019). The overall result is that today, global land wealth concentration may be at a modern apex and is more concentrated than income – a condition that is likely to endure, as land inequality is particularly durable over time (Ceddia, 2019).

Even as global land transfers intensify, they are vexingly difficult to follow (International Land Coalition, 2020). The difficulty arises in part because of the complexity of actors and of the financial and legal instruments used, and because of the variety of pathways through which land transfers play out (Christophers, 2018). The opacity of land transactions can also be deliberate, as when elites seek to avoid public scrutiny of their land deals, and/or when the deals are illegal, and/or when they are financed with the proceeds of criminal activities (Guereña, 2016; Tellman et al., 2020).

Why us

So land ownership and control are more influential than ever in shaping global trajectories of land use, management, and cover. But isn’t the land change science community already addressing this issue? To be sure, land tenure variables have long been used by land system analysts to explain spatio-temporal patterns in land cover and land use (e.g., Liverman & National Research Council Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change, 1998). Today, land change scientists are increasingly contending with the role of the new actors shaping global land trajectories, although much work remains (Verburg et al., 2019). And land scientists are leading the way in developing new approaches, and finding new datasets, for measuring and modeling the pathways by which these new actors acquire control over land (Agrawal et al., 2019; Le Polain de Waroux et al., 2018; Magliocca et al., 2019; Tellman et al., 2020). There is also growing attention to the implications of land wealth concentration for ecosystem health and ecosystem services (Laterra et al., 2018), for climate change mitigation (Munroe & McSweeney, 2019), for food production and, through taxes, for development writ large (Ceddia, 2019).

Still, there are at least two ways in which land system science arguably has yet to coalesce around a collective, explicit, and overarching focus on land proprietorship.

Land governance vs. land control

Land system scientists have been much more likely to engage with issues of property rights and land tenure regimes, typically framed by the language of land and resource institutions and governance, than with land control (e.g., Various authors, 2019). This may relate to the fact that the language of rights and regimes is the one through which land change researchers have been most likely to engage policymakers, funders, and NGOs in national and multilateral contexts. Of course, land control, governance, and institutions are profoundly inter-related; land control operates with and through often highly dynamic modes of land governance. Put another way: there is no question that land rights are primordial to our science; they are the institutions that set the rules by which land holding and land management are governed.

To date, however, the ‘control’ portion of this trifecta has been relatively under-scrutinized. Until we collectively elevate it, we will be unable to address basic questions about just who wins and who loses as the land ‘game’ plays out at the global scale. Who comes to own what? How is land – and how are land rents – distributed? Who holds wealth in land, and who doesn’t? What are the implications of the social distribution of land and rents? After all, the holding of rights to land is not necessarily equivalent to who controls land and who benefits from the stream of related benefits. The distinction may appear subtle but is vital for how land change unfolds on the ground. The struggle over land rights does not end when those rights (whatever form they take) are granted. It just initiates a new phase of struggle to ensure that those rights can be defended and secured such that the rights-holders are also those who control access, use, long-term management, and transfer of the land. Our purpose here, however, is not to parse the complexities of land property, access and control (for this, see, e.g., Cole & Ostrom, 2012; Ribot & Peluso, 2003). Rather, we wish to encourage more explicit attention to land control as an essential complement to existing concerns for land governance and institutions.

Scaling up and visualizing

The second way that land system science stops short in its engagement with de facto land control is in the dearth of studies that aspire to scale up case-study-level insights to begin to build a synoptic global picture. The question of Who Owns the Earth presupposes a global vision, a collective and aggregate stock-taking. There is no doubt that doing so will require eliding the intriguing, fine-grained variation in how land is held and defended across the world’s cultures and institutions. But the challenge is akin to the process by which we have generalized out from equally diverse forms of land use and land cover. Doing so will answer, for the Earth as a whole, such basic questions as: What states, entities, collectives, or individuals control how land is used, traded, leveraged, and invested in? How do patterns of ownership vary over space, and how have they changed through time? Who effectively controls the means by which we as humans are fed and live? What distributions of ownership and land wealth are optimal for ecological and social objectives, such as sustainability, food provisioning, human health and welfare?

The land system science community is well-positioned to begin to tackle this synoptic assessment, and to depict it visually at the global scale. Methodologically, the community has been at the forefront of efforts to scale up from the specifics of local, regional, and national case studies to the level of the planet; we are experienced in combining grounded analysis and remote sensing imagery in sophisticated GIS and agent-based modeling environments; we routinely visualize the results in maps, cartograms and satellite-image-based animations. Empirically too, the community is well prepared to take on the challenge: we have a rich collective archive of land control/ownership patterns world-wide; our ‘bank’ of case studies spans a the full range of land ownership types and experiences from which to train a broader, bottom-up aggregation effort. Indeed, our community is already leading calls for complementary global efforts, including the need for an open-access global land price database (Coomes et al., 2018) and a public global land tenure database (Meyer, 2019).

What will it take?

Will this be difficult? Absolutely. The conceptual, methodological, empirical, analytical and organizational hurdles are daunting and more than we can enumerate here. As a research community, we will need to develop a broad and explicit consensus that control over land deserves a place alongside more classic pillars of land change science. To ensure that a robust theory of change underlies the endeavor, we will need to more carefully and consciously integrate political-economic analysis into our conceptual scaffolding. More work will be necessary to establish instances and typologies of land control. How do you classify a parcel, for example, that is owned by one entity but leased for 99 years to another? How do you simultaneously account for indigenous-controlled territories while acknowledging illegal private inholdings? The data challenges are also steep. Complete, reliable, and publicly available records of land holding are beyond the scope of many national governments. Where advanced cadastral systems exist, the data may be of uneven quality, may not be publicly available, or may be held privately and be prohibitively expensive (Christophers, 2018). Spatially explicit agricultural census data are dated and incomplete (Lowder et al., 2016). Moreover, patterns of land control are difficult, often impossible, to infer from space. On the ground, land is often legitimately contested by multiple parties. Case studies are limited in their coverage and comparability. And land control is always dynamic, meaning that ‘snapshot’ studies can quickly become out of date.

These hurdles will challenge our collective ability to combine insights across scales, to aggregate data in meaningful ways, and to develop novel inference techniques. As a classically ‘wicked problem,’ it will test the limits of our interdisciplinary science models (see Chowdhury et al., 2019; Grove & Pickett, 2019). But what worthwhile challenge doesn’t?

What would success look like?

Let’s fast-forward to a possible, not-too-distant future. The land system science community – through collective, coordinated, and careful effort – has launched a set of high-profile scientific papers and online platforms that outline what share of the Earth’s land is held publicly and privately, what share of land wealth is controlled by corporations, states, individuals, indigenous peoples, small farmers versus large landowners, absentee owners vs. residents; whose land is valued and taxed at what rates, and so on. The output has been steady and attention-grabbing. One study features a Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient of global land wealth distribution. Another compares land distributions by region, finding surprising patterns of land and resource distribution across the globe. A new website highlights changes in global land concentration over time and achieves widespread attention for its ‘land privatization clock,’ which shows the pace, in real time, at which the Earth’s wealthiest landowners are accumulating landed assets. The steady drumbeat of articles and online visualizations is matched by enthusiastic media and public attention. Public discussion of the findings spurns lawmakers and policy leaders at multiple scales to debate policies around wealth inequality, fiscal strategy, trade and poverty alleviation.

Land change scientists are now at the center of a vigorous global debate. They find their science challenged by powerful critics; they are inspired to build new and better methods to add even greater rigor into their science. There is backlash within the ranks; some are frustrated that the research community has perhaps become ‘too political,’ putting scientists in conflict with funders. Others fear that the work might be accelerating the commodification of indigenous lands and conservation set-asides by highlighting their extent, location and value. Proponents counter that the science of Who Owns the Earth need not imply a particular normative vision but is more an accounting of what is, while some peasant and indigenous organizations celebrate how the work draws much-needed attention to threats to their lands and territories. Meanwhile, land system science programs surge in popularity among students, and new public and private funders emerge to support this transformative understanding of Earth. Land system science finds itself in a highly generative era of heady ferment: socially relevant, contested, and intellectually riveting.

Does this sound far-fetched? Implausible? Perhaps less so if one considers that efforts to enumerate land control at small scales have tended to draw widespread public attention. They have also helped to spur new ways of thinking about agrarian structures, land and resource management, sustainability, poverty alleviation – many of the very topics on which land change scientists aspire to offer insight. A few examples may suffice.

In England, the recent revelation that half of the country’s land is owned by less than 1% of the population has inspired new conversations about the limits to upward social mobility, the best social uses for land, and the productivity and sustainability challenges associated with land ownership concentration (Monbiot et al., 2019). In the US, the ground-breaking book Who Owns Appalachia (1983) established that most of the region's mountains, forest and subsurface wealth had been controlled for decades by absentee owners. The book redirected explanations about Appalachian poverty away from some unique regional pathology to underlying issues of power, corporate taxation, and uneven development. In the American West, recent and massive land purchases by the ultra-rich are raising important questions about how land ownership shapes conservation and democratic processes (Farrell, 2020). Indeed, the trend in the US towards rent-seeking behavior and rising wealth inequality begs the question of land ownership (Stiglitz, 2019).

These examples offer important lessons for future attempts to determine Who Owns the Earth. Among them is the fact that this topic can raise the hackles of the powerful. The English land report describes how large landowners have long sought to keep land ownership data secret (Monbiot et al., 2019). Powerful interests will always seek to limit public scrutiny of the extent of their wealth and, by extension, their power. It is in their interests to not have land control become an object of world-wide interrogation; to instead, for example, cloak land privatization schemes in the language of food security and development (Mousseau, 2019).

All the more need, then, to assess and map land proprietorship and land transfers, and to do so at a global scale. If the task seems daunting, so it must have been too for those back in the early days of satellite imagery, as they struggled to wrangle files from wary bureaucrats and secretive military offices, stitched the images together, interpreted them, and put together a composite understanding of the Earth’s changing surface. They likely never imagined that one day their children, cell phone in hand, could watch how the subdivisions in which they grew up replaced farmland, could use real-time visualizations of forest destruction to boycott Indonesian palm oil, or could marshal images of Arctic sea ice retreat to rally for climate change action.

Today, there’s a new challenge. Let’s take the lead in making global patterns and trajectories of land ownership and control visible and widely available. All of the world needs to know Who Owns the Earth, and our community is well-positioned to provide that big picture.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to express their gratitude to the Editor and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.