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Paper short abstract

French farmland regulation has historically granted farmers strong land rights while sidelining ownership and market exchange, as long as farmers pursue intensive farming. This regime, shaped by a productivist definition of righteous use, is now challenged by neoliberal and environmental critiques.

Paper long abstract

Theories of property have often begun with land, treating it as a determinate object that can be owned, exchanged, and accumulated. Building on critiques that emphasise land’s indeterminacy, this paper examines a case in which land value rests not on transferable property titles but on historically situated and collectively judged notions of “righteous use”.

I present research on France’s “Land Parliaments”: regional commissions that adjudicate land conflicts and allocate farming rights. They bring together farmers’ unions, agribusiness representatives, state officials, and environmental stakeholders to evaluate competing land claims. In these settings, land does not circulate as a commodity but is governed through collective deliberation. These institutions explicitly claim to govern land democratically: taking these claims seriously as an object of analysis, I examine how these arenas exercise authority on what farmland is by choosing who to allocate it to.

Established in the 1960s, this regulation has granted farmers strong, durable land rights while completely sidelining landowners, on the condition that land be used “productively”. This has rendered landowners irrelevant and has protected farmland from market exchange, achieving a form of land justice for farmers as long as they commit to intensive farming. However, this arrangement is now being fragilised as environmental critiques challenge productivist definitions of “righteous use”.

By analysing Land Parliaments as institutions of collective valuation, this paper makes a contribution to agrarian studies and the anthropology of property by theorising land beyond exchange-based and ownership-centered paradigms.