This paper criticises prevailing approaches to distributing territorial rights and provides an alternative. Some accounts of territorial rights base a social group's claim to land upon the fact that the group has collectively laboured upon the land over time. Call these Lockean accounts (e.g. Cara Nine 2012). Other accounts, such as Tamar Meisels (2005) and David Miller 1995 base a social group's claim to land on the basis that the group shaped the land according to its beliefs and values: it imprinted its identity upon the land. Both make the point that the group acts upon the land, so call both types "group action" approaches. After reviewing problems with both types of group-action approaches, the paper introduces the "interactive account". The interactive account makes an extra step, in arguing that as well as shaping their local environment via their collective labour, social groups are themselves shaped by that process. The relationship between land and social group is mutually constitutive and mutually shaping. This paper describes the interactive account and shows how it can make a better case for (pro tanto) territorial rights than the group-action approaches. Moreover, it is also better at explaining why the rights granted should be territorial rights, rather than collective property rights.
