Green Generosity or Long-Term Control?: Conditional Land Gifts and Climate Governance

Land-use is ever more recognized as playing an important role in climate change mitigation. Far-reaching control and use rights for landowners – especially large scale wealthy and institutional landowners – mean that this group is pivotal in shaping land-use-related climate protection measures. While their power and influence are well defined regarding Privately Protected Areas (see e.g. Farrell, 2020), there is another, less direct form in which large private wealth shapes environmental outcomes: conditional land gifts to states. Gifts like these contradict an initial expectation asserting that wealthy individuals aim to preserve and increase their wealth and manage their assets accordingly. Super-wealthy landowners voluntarily forego an ownership claim over their often highly valuable shares of their landed assets. This research project asks (1) in how far super-wealthy landowners can wield power through climate protection-related gift-giving and (2) how processes in which assets are stripped of their monetary future-oriented valuation by withdrawing them from the market, for example through gifts and long-term protection commitments, can be conceptualized. Previous research has established that some owners of specific assets, such as digital platforms, can maintain control and thus power without clear ownership claims over the underlying asset through licensing, resulting in continuous rent extraction (Birch & Muniesa, 2020; Perzanowski & Schultz, 2018). However, the case of conditional land gifts for the purpose of climate protection challenges previous findings by the additional feature that the super wealthy still maintain some form of control over the shape of nature conservation “in perpetuity” through the conditionalities of the gift. This is the case even though their legal ownership claim is dissolved and with it the possibility for rent extraction. This gives this group the power to shape the climate protection trajectory and potentially disenfranchises other local stakeholders. Bringing together insides from land assetization research, considerations on business, super wealthy and state power as well as on neoliberal conservation, this paper establishes a comprehensive overview of the scope and amount of protected areas that are conditionally gifted to states and analyses the consequences of the expansion of protected areas gift through different cases identified in the first step, using elite interviews and document and newspaper analysis. It empirically investigates the super wealthy’s motivation in foregoing some of their monetary claims and the negation processes of conditional donations, considering the state as well as other related stakeholders, and the power they wield in this process. Hereby, it considers how power dynamics formed in markets are transferred to non-market arenas and how these in turn impact climate protection trajectories that impact local groups related to the respective land as well as societies overall in the short and long run. References Birch, K., & Muniesa, F. (Eds.). (2020). Inside Technology. Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism. The MIT Press. https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/78592 Perzanowski, A., & Schultz, J. (2018). The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10524.001.0001