In person icon Environmental Land Politics: Regulation, Ownership and Protection

Abstract

Contemporary environmental challenges have thrust land into the centre of political and policy debates. This panel explores how intensifying pressures around climate change, biodiversity loss, and sustainability are transforming traditional approaches to land governance, ownership, and use. As nations grapple with ambitious environmental targets and mounting ecological pressures, land has become a crucial arena where competing visions of regulation, protection, ownership, control and social justice intersect. The panel explores how the imperatives of climate action and environmental protection are reshaping conventional understanding of property rights, land ownership, land valuation and management. The panel considers how these developments reflect broader transformations in society-nature relationships. As environmental imperatives increasingly shape land governance, traditional paradigms of land use and development are being challenged by new ecological imaginaries. Through diverse case studies and methodological approaches, the papers in this panel illuminate how environmental land politics are characterised by complex interactions between public and private actors, competing claims to authority and expertise, and tensions between market-based solutions and more transformative visions of change. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for addressing key challenges of our time, from meeting international conservation targets to ensuring just transitions to sustainable land use practices. The panel contributes to broader debates about environmental governance by examining how land-based climate solutions are creating new forms of power, control, and resistance, while raising fundamental questions about who gets to shape land use decisions in an era of ecological crisis.

Title	Details
Title: "Land, Property Rights, and Public Policy: the Role of Environmental Organizations in Shaping Land Use Regulation.	View Paper Details
Green Generosity or Long-Term Control?: Conditional Land Gifts and Climate Governance	View Paper Details
Policies and Politics of Abandoned Farmland in France and Italy: New Resources for Green Transitions?	View Paper Details
The Disappearance of Land Use from UNFCCC Decisions: A Guided Topic Analysis	View Paper Details
Rewilding and Landownership: a Mutually Transformative Relationship	View Paper Details