Collective Farmland Ownership in Aotearoa: Radical Potential or Trojan Horse?

Food movement activists and radical food scholars have increasingly engaged with questions of land in recent years, questioning the role of private individual ownership (Borras et al., 2015; Calo et al., 2021; Lubbock, 2020; Tilzey, 2018; Wach & Hall, 2024), pursuing the right to land and territory (Claeys, 2020; Suárez, 2013), contesting land grabs (McMichael, 2015), and enacting and promoting land occupations and popular “land reform from below” (Oldham et al., 2024; Roman-Alcalá, 2015; Wittman et al., 2017, p. 304). In response to a growing recognition of the challenges posed to food system transformations by the private ownership model, some have increasingly advocate for land commoning through, amongst other approaches, collective land tenure models (Ecological Land Cooperative, 2023; Goris et al., 2024; Hachmyer, 2017; Mackenzie, 2013; Maughan & Ferrando, 2020; Wach & Hall, 2024; Yakini, 2017). Yet Calo et al (2024) identify the potential limitations of such collective approaches, arguing that they are at risk of being “warped” (p. 7) by productivist logics of business efficiency. This paper unpacks these contending perspectives on the potential of collective landownership in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, asking whether such tenurial forms fulfil the radical potential they have sometimes been ascribed, or whether they are constrained by the broader landscape of farmland property relations. Further, it seeks to understand how, and in what ways, these collective governance models, and the actors involved with them, reject and/or reproduce the private ownership model. To answer these questions, this paper takes a legal geographical approach which understands property relations not only as a set of social norms or imaginaries (Sippel & Visser, 2021), but as an enforceable set of rules established through statutes and legal precedents which shape the physical and ideological space of Aotearoa’s rural landscapes (Bennett & Layard, 2015). At the same time, these spatio-legal arrangements are not fixed but rather a consequence of ongoing enactments by both legal and non-legal actors (Blomley, 2005). This analysis reveals that, on the one hand, collectively owned and governed lands are sites of resistance to the ownership model of property, prefiguring non-commodified relationships to land and non-hierarchical, collective forms of decision-making. Yet at the same time, the legal structures and rules which govern collective tenure, and their ongoing enactments, reproduce a particular colonial capitalist form of land relation that foregrounds logics of abstraction, productivity and improvement. Collective owners are incentivised to act as shareholders and authority is centralised, while the ‘best’ use of land comes to be understood as those uses which best enable the fulfilment of productivist, profit-oriented land use. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates that making ownership collective does not, in and of itself, indicate a transformation of property relations. Collectively owned farms can be “commons on the inside” but “[private] property on the outside” (Rose, 2020, p. 562). Indeed, it could be argued that as long as they remain “[private] property on the outside”, they cannot really become “commons on the inside.”