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Presentation short abstract

Neo-land sparing revives a flawed logic: intensify agriculture to “save” nature. Framed as green transition, it narrows land futures, locking in industrial paradigms under the guise of sustainability. We expose this policy legend and warn how it colonizes land governance.

Presentation long abstract

As governments mobilize ambitious green transition agendas, land-use change has become a central site of contestation—yet dominant policy narratives risk constraining their transformative potential. The land sparing–land sharing (SpSh) framework, introduced in the early 2000s, offered a heuristic by positing two strategies: intensifying production to “spare” land for nature, or integrating biodiversity within agricultural landscapes. While SpSh stimulated valuable work, its simplifying assumptions proved ill-suited to complex land systems, leading most scholars to move beyond the debate. Recently, however, a reductionist revival—what we term “neo-land sparing”—has gained traction among policy platforms, think tanks, and agribusiness actors. This rhetoric reframes sustainability as contingent on agricultural intensification, presenting yield maximization as a proxy for ecological and social progress.To understand this resurgence, we trace the genealogy of SpSh and analyze neo-land sparing discourse across think tank publications, policy positions, agribusiness communications, and academic literature. Emphasis is placed on influential actors such as Our World in Data, the Breakthroughs Institute, prminent media, and leading agribusiness firms. Drawing on science and technology studies, we conceptualize neo-land sparing as a “policy legend”: a socio-technical imaginary that mobilizes actors around a technocratic vision of land use, despite empirical critiques and viable alternatives. Our analysis shows how neo-land sparing narrows the parameters of food system transformation, reinforcing industrial paradigms under the guise of sustainability. We conclude with a warning: as climate change intensifies pressures on land use, an unchallenged land sparing legend risks colonizing the future and foreclosing more plural, just pathways for land governance.