Equity and Ecological Concerns Take Centre Stage at PPLA International Conference

Between the 29th and 30th August 2022, PPLA held its international event “Implications of Land Governance on Social Justice Outcomes for EU Policy”. The event convened leading scholars and practitioners in the field of land governance and concerned civil society organisations for one and a half days of vibrant discussion. Papers concerned with diverse jurisdictions from Colombia to Bangladesh, via Germany, Mozambique and Northern Ireland provided the basis for animated debate and the identification of common trends that are the basis for PPLA’s policy recommendations to decision-makers.

Broadly, almost regardless of context, land governance outcomes continue to be neither socially inclusive nor ecologically sound. Artificial distinctions between Global South and North were usefully deconstructed as academic findings from Felicitas Sommer in the German context found ready points of comparison with the observations of Sylvia Kay, representing the Transnational Institute (TNI) and Bridget Murphy from La Via Campesina’s Irish affiliate Talamh Beo, that this state of affairs is true for European Union member states, as well as in India and Kenya. Common trends associated with these regressive outcomes include the concurrent financialisation of land, unchecked expansion of industrial agriculture and digitalisation of information concerning land use and ownership.

In line with the Special Issue objective to identify what “an expanded repertoire of theory, practice and policy…better placed to achieve socially just settlements of rights to land” might look, Professor Bina Agarwal delivered the event’s keynote address “Can group farming empower rural women? India’s Experience.” Based on her decades of cutting-edge scholarship concerning the relationship between land ownership and women’s empowerment in the South Asian context, Prof Agarwal restated the central issue that without equal ownership of land, empowerment of rural women is impossible. She then gave a tour d’horizon concerning a number of recent experiments in group farming that demonstrate positive results, including higher resilience to major shocks like the Covid pandemic.