Title: "Land, Property Rights, and Public Policy: the Role of Environmental Organizations in Shaping Land Use Regulation.

Land has become an increasingly scarce and contested resource, with global challenges like population growth, urbanization, and environmental degradation placing significant pressure on its use. The push to meet the 30x30 conservation targets from the Convention on Biological Diversity—aiming to protect 30% of the planet’s land and ocean by 2030—has intensified debates surrounding land regulation. In this regard, environmental organizations play a critical role in shaping land policies through advocacy, legal action, and conservation efforts. Groups such as The Nature Conservancy and WWF employ market-based tools like conservation easements and biodiversity offsets to protect land from development, helping secure ecosystems in the face of increasing urban pressures (Fitzsimons 2015). These organizations also engage in policy advocacy, pushing for reforms that connect land-use regulation with economic incentives for sustainability, such as Payments for Ecosystem Services (Richardson et al. 2024). In addition to their advocacy work, these groups sometimes turn to litigation to challenge land-use policies that threaten biodiversity, using the legal system to contest harmful development projects (Vanhala 2018). This paper examines how institutional, legal, and economic opportunity structures influence the strategies and actions of environmental organizations in land policies. Through a comparative case study of two environmental organizations in Switzerland (Pro Natura) and Australia (The Nature Conservancy), it explores the roles, strategies, and repertoires of action these groups employ, as well as their potential to act as regulatory intermediaries in land governance. Drawing on an original dataset of interviews, documents, and media analyses, the study presents four key findings: 1. Despite the high costs, land ownership remains a preferred strategy for environmental organizations seeking to exert long-term influence over land-use regulation. 2. Significant landownership provides environmental organizations with crucial access to political arenas, allowing them to shape land policies from within. 3. The increasing demand for specialized expertise in areas such as biodiversity, soil science, monitoring technologies, and collaborative governance creates important windows of opportunity for environmental organizations to engage in land policymaking. 4. Environmental organizations often articulate distinct visions of land regulation—defining which lands should be regulated and how—that can sometimes conflict with other knowledge systems, such as Indigenous perspectives. Finally, this article concludes by offering some perspectives on the role of third actors in the regulation of common resources such as land. Specifically, the article questions the need for transparency and accountability in land governance structures, which largely rely on market-based mechanisms driven by non-state actors.