Transforming Land for Sustainable Food: Emerging contests to property regimes in the Global North

Land relations—property, access, tenure, landscape—are a central underlying driver of the material form of food systems, from farm to distribution. Despite their fluidity and historical and geographical diversity, land relations have a tendency to become normalized through law, custom, and practice. In particular, the exclusionary private “ownership model” of property has come to be deeply entrenched in legal systems worldwide, particularly in the Global North. The power of this normalization is evidenced, for example, in how research and practice aimed at reshaping food systems from grassroots movement, policy-level, or biophysical perspectives often omit the role of land relations in bringing about agricultural sustainability and agrarian change. Understanding land relations as static thus potentially constrains or directs the kinds of sustainable agriculture and food transformations that can take place. Entrenched norms of property drastically limit the urgent possibilities of food system transformation. However, a confluence of political and ecological conflagrations may be placing land back on the agenda and in the forefront of people’s minds. In a moment when hegemonic understandings of land and property can also appear absurd and paper thin, we describe counter movements bubbling up to contest the status quo of the land food nexus from within the core. This article introduces a Special Feature centering the role of land in sustainable food transformations. The collection provides new understandings on how governance of land (property relations, land access, land tenure, landscape policy) mediates the potential for food system change. The special feature goes beyond understanding dynamics of the land food nexus to ask how land relations can be reformed to create favorable conditions for more just and sustainable food systems to emerge. We highlight five empirical domains of transforming land relations from within the Global North: legislating land reform, quasi market reforms, remaking land for sustainability agendas, Indigenous claims to land in the settler state, and using municipal power to unlock land. Each domain has the potential to act as a non-reformist reform but each carries its own drawbacks and limitations. Nevertheless, if our argument holds that there will be no food system transformation without a parallel remake of land relations, it is time to start organizing a concerted effort for land reform bespoke to geographical and political contexts.