Moving toward a fairer access to land fostering agroecological transition? A decade of legal change and reframing of debates around soil and climate in France

Abstract

Although farmland concentration receives narrower media coverage than land grab, it goes hand in hand with impactful environmental and demographic consequences. This article examines the case of France, one of the European countries with the highest level of farmland market control. It questions to what extent the regulation of access to land is adapted to initiate an agroecological and food transition. Its objective is to analyze why and how land concentration has been reframed in the past decade, by which types of stakeholders, building on which sources of legitimacy, and with which legal strategies and results. The theoretical framework combines the sociology of controversies and agenda-setting with a land justice-based approach. This article builds on a textual hermeneutics of 3 documental corpora encompassing a press review with 172 items, 112 documents (press releases, opinion pages, reports, notes, interviews, public speeches, amendment proposals, draft bills, laws, and decisions), and 3,409 tweets (those mentioning loi foncière or the #LoiFoncière hashtag, and those quoting, retweeting, or replying (to) them). These data were contextualized using sporadic participant observation. Since 2013, and more specifically since 2018, 2 networks of left-wing politicians, left-wing farmers’ unions, and civil society nongovernmental organizations have brought land justice concerns up-to-date to put farmland concentration on the political agenda. However, only minor progress has been made. A major factor in this is the chronological gap between, on the one hand, the successive reframings of the issue (from soil quality and climate change mitigation lenses), the proposed legal devices, the degree of projected legal change and, on the other hand, the pace at which the window of opportunity for a new land law has opened and closed. Indeed, the land imaginaries of land commons that underpin the agroecological transition are not yet sufficiently socially legitimate to be enshrined in law.