Presentation short abstract

The paper, by looking at ‘Additions’ to Protected Areas as projects of restoration of nature, examines how it disrupts land tenure securing process for local marginal communities and reproduces unequal dynamics of land control in a land deficit region.

Presentation long abstract

Nature conservation projects like Protected Areas have been linked to marginalisation of local communities across the globe through land grab and enclosure. These land grabs alter socio-economic structure of rural societies by turning agrarian land into conservation forests. In this process, it reconfigures landholding dynamics and recreate precarity of marginal groups who have been historically struggling with land control under private landholding regime. The paper attempts to examine this through the case of a peripheral village of Kaziranga National Park & Tiger Reserve in India. The village, Borbeel, engulfed into the peculiar ‘Additions’ of the Park’s area (on paper) is inhabited by a local tribal community who were displaced earlier and resettled there due to river erosions. This community who has historically been at the margins of regional power dynamics, having minimal land control, has been struggling to secure land tenure rights in a land deficit region. The Additions, with eviction threats, disrupt this process and continue the unequal power dynamics of land control between different communities, and between people and corporates. Looking at these ‘Additions’ as nature restoration projects, the paper examines how a non-sedentary agrarian community’s aspirations get entangled between land dispossession, resettlement, land tenuring and nature conservation. It elucidates this entanglement by bringing forth their stories of migration, land occupation, livelihood practice and resistance. The paper argues that restoration of nature becomes an agent in reproducing precarity and inequality of land control for local marginal communities, causing socio-economic distress and reproducing marginality.

Presentation short abstract

To better understand the relationships between past and current land dynamics, we explore an ongoing agroforestry project in an Ecuadorian conservation frontier, exploring how land dynamics stemming from the creation of an ecological reserve go on to impact farmers’ participation in the project.

Presentation long abstract

The creation of protected areas has long been a staple of global conservation policy, often accompanied by profound impacts on local communities and land dynamics. In some cases, the creation of such spaces results in “conservation frontiers” where ecological and human interests are co-evolving and sometimes conflicting. To understand how the land dynamics behind these conservation frontiers impact new conservation strategies, we focus on the case of Ecuador’s Mache-Chindul Ecological Reserve, a reserve established in the 1990s atop existing agricultural communities. In and around this Reserve, an initiative is underway to increase smallholder farmers’ cultivation of cacao in agroforestry systems with hopes of improving livelihoods, improving conservation outcomes within the Reserve, and expanding a form of conservation outside of the Reserve. While other research from this area explores the complex land dynamics which have influenced conventional cacao cultivation and by extension deforestation within the Reserve, we seek to understand how these same land dynamics are now influencing participation in this agroforestry initiative. We employ a methodology rooted in interviews and focus groups with farmers inside and outside of the Reserve. These methods result in a holistic understanding of farmers’ varied and evolving relationships with their land, drawing a throughline between the creation of the Reserve, the ways it impacted livelihoods and land dynamics, and the present ways that smallholders perceive this agroforestry initiative. Our findings have implications for the broader Green Transition, highlighting the temporal interconnectedness of “green” projects and the ways they may shape local contexts and land dynamics.

Presentation short abstract

Carbon farming is significant in rural-remote Australia, where settler pastoralism, First Nations’ custodianship, and corporate land sector investments collide. After extensive uptake over a decade, carbon farming is leading to new land dynamics: power, property and nature are all being reworked.

Presentation long abstract

A land-use revolution has been unfolding over the last decade in parts of rural and remote Australia, where projects under the Australian Carbon Credit Unit (ACCU) scheme or “carbon farming” have been extensively implemented. The ACCU scheme deploys various methods to generate carbon credits through land-use change. The most popular method to date has been Human Induced Regeneration (HIR), which involves the reduction of activities that supress vegetation growth - like livestock grazing, fodder harvesting, and other forms of land clearing - to allow landscape recovery. Projects using this method now cover over 40 million hectares of remote rangelands, and in some areas 30% of land has been contracted for carbon farming. Recent fieldwork in one of these “high uptake” areas shows diverse land dynamics: a significant proportion of early projects involved new corporate or absentee landowners, who acquired land for carbon farming under a “lock up and leave” model. More recent projects, however, demonstrate more liberatory and regenerative potentials: indeed, carbon farming can support local landholders to care for land, and First Nations people to return to country. Carbon farming should be better regulated to achieve these more desirable outcomes.

Presentation short abstract

This study examines how land tenure—individual vs. communal—shapes local perceptions of fairness in benefit sharing from PES and carbon projects in Peru and Kenya. It highlights how property regimes influence legitimacy, distribution preferences, and tensions around equity.

Presentation long abstract

Nature-based carbon and Payment for Ecosystem Service (PES) projects are reshaping land use practices of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPLCs), often in exchange for monetary or in-kind benefits. These shifts frequently alter intra- and inter-community dynamics, raising questions about who benefits and who is excluded. Central to these projects are benefit sharing mechanisms (BSMs), which determine how returns are distributed and who is recognized as legitimate beneficiaries.

Scholars and practitioners emphasize the need for BSMs to be locally embedded and co-designed-not only to enhance equity and legitimacy, but also to ensure long-term conservation outcomes. While many enabling factors for equitable benefit sharing are documented, little comparative, qualitative research explores how IPLCs perceive fairness and legitimacy in BSMs. Local ideas of fairness are shaped by histories, norms, and lived experience. Tensions often arise between competing allocation logics- rewarding performance, compensating costs, or prioritizing the poorest.

Drawing on nearly 450 interviews from 16 PES and carbon projects in Peru and Kenya, we examine how BSM preferences vary across land tenure regimes-communal and individual holdings-and how these intersect with governance, demographic factors, and local justice norms to shape perceived legitimacy and project outcomes. Preliminary findings show that most respondents favor combining individual performance-based rewards with allocations for vulnerable groups or those who have historically stewarded nature. However, these hybrid approaches can also reproduce inequalities or enable elite capture. This raises critical questions about whether BSMs can reconcile divergent fairness logics in socially differentiated landscapes.

Presentation short abstract

This article analyzes a village’s redistribution of municipal farmland and the green claims surrounding it. While such initiatives can challenge historical land inequalities, they remain constrained by structural factors that sustain environmental injustices for different groups of farmers.

Presentation long abstract

The agricultural sector both drives and suffers from environmental crises, placing it at the heart of green transitions. This article examines how local governments intervene in these transitions through land redistribution, focusing on a village in the French Pyrenees that has allocated municipal land to farmers as part of its environmental policy. The case unfolds in a context marked by a historical concentration of land in the hands of a few pastoral livestock farmers, a legacy of post-1950s agricultural modernization and Common Agricultural Policy subsidies tied to land area, which have contributed to demographic decline. These subsidies, justified through environmental rhetoric (grazing as biodiversity maintenance), have reinforced an export-oriented livestock model. At the same time, neo-rural arrivals have introduced alternative agricultural projects, such as vegetable production and short food circuits, framed as environmentally friendly practices. Competing green claims thus shape debates about who is legitimate to access farmland. This article analyzes how these claims informed the village’s use of the legal mechanism “biens vacants et sans maître” (ownerless properties) to recover and redistribute land. A participatory assembly of local officials and citizens decided which farmers could lease or purchase this land, often invoking “food sovereignty” as an environmental strategy. Drawing on an environmental justice lens, the article shows how this initiative reshaped local land relations and redefined whose green claims are recognized. While local redistribution initiatives can challenge land inequalities, they remain constrained by structural factors that perpetuate land concentration and systemically linked environmental injustices for different groups of farmers.

Presentation short abstract

In Norwegian mountain commons, wolverine conservation reshapes landscape imaginaries and rural lives. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores shifting values of land and land dynamics in the green transition, revealing an emerging commons with different premises of sharing a landscape.

Presentation long abstract

The establishment of predator prioritized zones for species conservation within traditional grazing landscapes in Norway has led to significant loss in farmers’ livestock herds, farmer economies and as well as changing rural socialities. This represent a new land dynamic which shows how the rural becomes a frontier in the shifting value of landscapes, species protection, and the agrarian. In this paper, I build on ethnographic fieldwork in Norwegian rural mountain villages, where the conservation and governance of wolverines (lat: gulo gulo) have destabilized traditional agricultural practices such as common grazing (unfenced grazing in commons). Through the Bern Convention, Norway has a responsibility in managing and preserving the Northern European wolverine population which situates the green transition and its political aspiration not only locally, but also in a broader European context. This paper discusses the ways in which new political land dynamics displace and replace local landscape values and practices such as common grazing. In the "greening" of nature politics, mountain commons are transformed to a national biodiversity commons, and thus from local to national values of interest. Herein, the value of a species under threat of extinction is deemed irreplaceable, whilst loss of livestock can be economically compensated, and the abandonment of common grazing is seen as unavoidable under the notion of efficiency in agricultural production. In sum, rural commons exemplify a form of frontier assemblage, in which land dynamics trouble the shared capacity of commons through new mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in the name of green transition.

Presentation short abstract

The paper examines how Himba herders sustain rangelands through mobility, reciprocity and ecological knowledge. Their practices offer alternative ways of caring for the landscape, prompting reflection on how well NbS approaches fit pastoral life.

Presentation long abstract

In Namibia’s northern rangelands, emerging interventions framed as Nature-based Solutions (NbS) meet pastoral worlds shaped by mobility, social reciprocity, and long-standing ecological knowledge. Drawing on qualitative research with Himba herders in Northern Kunene, this contribution examines how external narratives of rangeland degradation, productivity, and “repair” circulate into pastoralist communities—and how they are quietly resisted, reinterpreted, or folded into existing practices. While interventions often emphasise technical fixes such as controlled grazing, improved breeding, and intensified disease surveillance, pastoralists’ own accounts foreground flexibility, multi-species relations, and the everyday labour of navigating uncertainty. These perspectives complicate assumptions embedded in NbS framings, particularly imaginaries of equilibrium, scalable solutions, and linear pathways toward resilience.

The findings highlight frictional encounters between externally promoted visions of ecological repair and locally grounded understandings of rangeland dynamics, labour, and value. Pastoralists situate current pressures not primarily in ecological decline, but in tightening enclosures, uneven veterinary service provision, market-oriented policy agendas, and the disruptive temporalities of state and donor interventions. Their narratives offer counter-imaginaries to dominant NbS discourses—centred on flexibility rather than fixity, relational care rather than technocratic optimisation, and negotiated co-existence rather than restoration to a presumed past state.

By foregrounding these lived stories, the paper argues for rethinking NbS through the politics of pastoralism: attending to whose knowledges count, whose labour enables “solutions,” and how interventions reshape social and ecological futures in Namibia’s rangelands.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how advocacy communities diagnose threats from land-based climate action, variably emphasising historical dispossession patterns or emerging governance challenges — and how these diagnostics shape competing pathways for land rights protection in climate governance.

Presentation long abstract

Since COP26's Forest Tenure Pledge through COP30's Intergovernmental Land Tenure Commitment, the land question has gained increasing visibility within climate governance. Diverse actors express concern over how climate mitigation strategies are accelerating land commodification and concentration, threatening land-dependent communities.

Behind this concern are advocacy communities of different kinds: global peasant movements, international solidarity organisations, Indigenous People and Local Community (IPLC) networks, climate justice organisations, institutional actors and engaged scholars. While sharing consensus over protecting local land rights, they defend different visions and mobilise different concepts—from land sovereignty to tenure security, climate justice, food sovereignty, land justice, and indigenous stewardship—each reflecting distinct values and political priorities. Those stressing historical continuities of domination and dispossession through framings like green colonialism call for radical transformation of climate action and rejection of market-based mechanisms. Others focus on governance gaps created by new carbon markets and rising financial actors, advocating for improved regulation, safeguards, and policy reforms within existing systems. Advocacy communities thus diverge in diagnostics and solutions: from rights-based approaches working within existing frameworks to demands for indigenous control over climate finance, or outright rejection of carbon markets.

Through discursive analysis of advocacy materials, formal policy declarations, and civil society manifestos from COP26 to COP30, this paper examines how advocacy communities diagnose land threats, what continuities and ruptures they emphasise, and how these diagnostics shape proposed solutions for land rights protection. The analysis reveals which strategic repertoires gain traction and what visions of land justice become visible—or remain silenced—in international climate governance.

Presentation short abstract

Scotland's just transition to net zero will require significant land use change, despite concerns in rural areas that this will entrench existing inequalities. This paper presents findings from interviews with rural "agents of change" to reveal the web of power relations shaping the transition.

Presentation long abstract

Scotland is at the forefront of polities implementing just transition policies (Abram et al., 2022), targeting a net zero economy by 2045 (Scottish Government, 2025). Land use change is fundamental to the achievement of this target, with the Scottish Government pursuing an approach contingent upon attracting private investment in ecological restoration, renewable energy, and carbon sequestration practices such as peatland restoration and re/afforestation (Scottish Government 2022, 2024).

Rural Scotland is a zone of contestation, where diverse values and power relations between actors will shape the just transition (Carmen et al, 2023; Cole et al, 2023). Land reform has been on the political agenda in Scotland for centuries, with the most recent political response to this debate explicitly linking future reform to the drive for net zero (Wightman, 2015). Despite a political push to renegotiate entrenched and imbalanced power relations, rural communities remain concerned that they will be expected to bear a disproportionate burden of the socioenvironmental costs associated with reaching net zero, coupled with inadequate opportunities to participate in decision-making processes (Daniels-Creasey & McKee, 2022; McIntosh, 2023), raising concerns of the imposition of a new era of land-based extractive practices (Franz & McNelly, 2024).

Using the just transition as an analytical lens, this paper foregrounds the different narratives emerging from rural Scotland, presenting analysis from a series of interviews with “agents of change” demonstrating the challenge in delivering a transition that addresses the myriad justice concerns of rural communities (Abram et al., 2022; Flood et al., 2022; Winkler, 2020).

Presentation short abstract

This paper asks how social property and climate change responses mutually remake one another in Oaxaca, Mexico. By examining carbon markets and wind expansion, it argues that such environmental interventions have had critical consequences for how we understand collective land.

Presentation long abstract

As climate change responses expand across rural areas in the global South, new investments interact with diverse land politics, modifying or competing with existing land uses and livelihood struggles. In the context of carbon markets or climate change mitigation projects, questions about how the land should be used, for what purposes, and with what consequences become relevant. This holds for the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, where approximately 80% of the land is still held under social property regimes. Climate change responses in this state interact with a different set of land authorities that respond in myriad ways, attending to distinct conceptualisations of collective land. This paper thus aims to answer the question of how and under what conditions collective land is made and remade in the context of climate change responses.

By examining two case studies, the international carbon market in the Chatino region and wind energy expansion in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, this paper argues that such environmental interventions have had critical consequences for the reorganisation of land tenure. In the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, wind energy expansion has disbanded social property through a slow transition to private property by exploiting an agrarian conflict that can be traced back to the 1960s. Carbon in the Chatino region has had unintended consequences and contradictory outcomes: communities negotiate and use it to avoid enclosure due to cattle expansion, yet it furthers processes of proxy privatisation. In both cases, notions of how social property should operate have challenged communal arrangements.

Presentation short abstract

Based on ethonographic fielwork in Wallonia, Belgium, this paper shows how energy investors, landowners, and farmers in negotiate contracts that convert agricultural land into solar farms, reshaping land access, control, and socio-ecological dynamics across landscapes.

Presentation long abstract

Conceptual and empirical work on renewable energy production as a socio-technical transition often disregards the land implications of renewable energy projects and the conflicts they generate at the local level particularly in marginal territories, where opposition to new solar and wind developments is increasing.

Taking these conflicts as an entry point to examine how new energyscapes are assembled and contested, this paper focuses specifically on the development of agrivoltaics in Wallonia, Belgium.

Based on more than thirty semi-structured interviews conducted in 2025, complemented by secondary data analysis, it employs actor-network mapping to trace how energy investors, landowners, and farmers interact at the farm level, and how both formal contracts and informal relations shape the transformation of agricultural land into solar farms. The paper argues that these contractual arrangements constitute a new form of contract farming centred on energy production – one that leaves land ownership formally untouched yet profoundly reconfigures dynamics of land access and control at the farm level and beyond. It concludes by showing how the conversion of agricultural land into solar farms reconfigures socio-ecological relations at multiple scales, indicating that renewable-energy-driven land transformations should be approached not as discrete, parcel-level alterations but as territorially embedded processes shaping broader living landscapes.

Presentation short abstract

Renewable-energy expansion in Thailand reshapes land ownership. Wind firms lease forest-reform plots via state-enabled loopholes, while solar projects rely on brokers assembling farmland for developers. These processes consolidate elite power and deepen rural land insecurity.

Presentation long abstract

The expansion of renewable energy, framed as a green transition, is reshaping land ownership across Asia and the Pacific. Thailand has seen rapid growth in wind and solar development over the past two decades, bringing private energy companies into rural territories as new land-claiming actors. This paper examines how land arrangements for renewable energy projects are negotiated and with what consequences. It argues that decarbonization initiatives have consolidated the power of state authorities and private land brokers rather than democratizing energy access.

Wind energy sites are predominantly located in forest patches and deforested areas originally allocated to poor farmers under land-reform schemes. Investors gain access to these plots through leasing, despite their formal designation for social welfare and conservation. Regulatory distortions by state agencies facilitate these deals and, in some forest sites, energy corporations have become additional actors in long-standing land conflicts between local villagers and the Forestry Department.

Solar projects, by contrast, require only open land with sufficient sunlight. Brokers purchase land from rural farmers, assemble it into large parcels, and resell it to solar developers. Rather than offering post-political solutions to climate change, renewable-energy land access relies on middlemen and state mediation, producing new layers of insecurity and economic vulnerability for rural farmers.