Land Stewardship
Carolina Yacamán Ochoa
At the global scale, the commodification of ways of life has intensified processes of territorial dispossession, extractivism, and the erosion of local knowledge and territorial identities—phenomena that some authors have described as epistemicides (Ortega, 2023). These dynamics are further reinforced by the expansion of governance models based on liberal democracy which, in many cases, subordinate or displace forms of community governance.
In this context, the relationship between private property and conservation constitutes a central theoretical and political issue. Critical scholarship has demonstrated that property regimes are not merely legal instruments for territorial management, but rather institutions deeply embedded in power relations and processes of accumulation. In particular, the expansion of private property has historically been associated with processes of enclosure and dispossession that transform shared goods and territories into resources subject to market logics (Harvey, 2003; Linebaugh, 2008). Within the field of conservation, this institutional configuration may encourage intensive land use or ecologically irresponsible practices, often justified by the assumption that on privately owned land “anything goes.” These dynamics reveal the limitations of governance models based exclusively on private property, opening the debate on alternative approaches to territorial governance.
In response to these limitations, the commons perspective offers an analytical and practical framework for rethinking the care of nature through collective logics based on shared responsibility, collective use, and community governance of territories. Numerous studies have demonstrated that collective management systems can generate robust institutions for conservation and the sustainable use of resources, particularly when communities actively participate in defining rules and monitoring mechanisms (Ostrom, 1990). This perspective thus highlights the potential to overcome some of the ecological and political limitations associated with managing nature under strictly private property regimes.
For decades, conservation organizations have argued that the protection of nature, landscapes, and cultural heritage cannot rely solely on public administrations but also requires the active involvement and self-organization of civil society. However, when such initiatives are developed individually or in isolation, their scope is often limited by a lack of technical information, insufficient time, or scarce financial resources. In this context, the land stewardship movement has emerged as a collective response aimed at overcoming these limitations by articulating networks of collaboration that connect, mobilize, and support individuals, communities, and organizations engaged in caring for, restoring, and defending territories and their socio-ecological values (Fischer, 2015).
There is a long tradition of land stewardship practices in Europe, Canada, and the United States, developed through diverse institutional arrangements generally based on principles of voluntarism, cooperation, and shared responsibility among different social actors. These initiatives have become established as instruments of environmental governance aimed at involving civil society in the conservation and sustainable management of territories, particularly on privately owned land—although not exclusively. In some countries and regions, land stewardship has also been incorporated into legal frameworks, reflecting its growing institutional recognition as a tool of environmental policy. In Spain, land stewardship is recognized in the Natural Heritage and Biodiversity Law, where it is defined as “the set of strategies or legal mechanisms through which landowners and land users are involved in the conservation and responsible use of natural, cultural, and landscape values and resources” (Art. 3.9, Law 42/2007).
More recently, land stewardship has been interpreted as part of a broader paradigm shift in which rights over land, culture, traditional knowledge, and governance are grounded in values that transcend market logics and are articulated through collective responsibility for environmental protection (Bavikatte & Bennett, 2015). From this perspective, land stewardship is closely connected to debates on the commons, insofar as it promotes voluntary conservation practices based on social agreements, shared norms, and cooperation among diverse actors in the care of socio-ecological resources (Bollier & Helfrich, 2019).
One of the defining characteristics of land stewardship compared with other conservation strategies is its strong grounding in collective action and civil society networking. Unlike more centralized conservation approaches, stewardship initiatives are driven by the participation of a wide range of actors—including conservation organizations, environmental groups, researchers, farmers, technical experts, and institutional stakeholders—who operate across multiple scales (local, regional, national, and international) to build shared visions regarding the care and land governance (Yacamán & García, 2020).
These networks not only facilitate coordination among dispersed initiatives but also create spaces for knowledge exchange, mutual learning, and collective reflection that strengthen stewardship practices. Through these collaborative processes, communities become democratically and deliberatively involved in conservation activities. In turn, the actors engaged in stewardship contribute to expanding the visibility of initiatives, sharing tools and conservation strategies, and identifying political, legal, or institutional barriers that hinder their expansion. Networking therefore, becomes a key element in consolidating land stewardship as a socio-ecological governance practice grounded in cooperation, shared knowledge, and collective responsibility for the care of common goods.
The institutionalization of land stewardship is materialized through stewardship contracts or agreements established between landowners or land users and stewardship organizations. These agreements define rights, responsibilities, and conservation commitments (De la Varga Pastor & Solé, 2018). Based on consensus between the parties, such agreements can be understood as legal instruments that facilitate cooperative forms of environmental governance between public and private actors aimed at strengthening environmental protection through clearly defined commitments (Sánchez Sáez, 2004).
Through voluntary agreements between landowners or land users and stewardship organizations, cooperation mechanisms are established primarily to restore ecosystems, enhance biodiversity, safeguard ecological functionality, and preserve traditional landscape features. Unlike other conservation instruments—such as the designation of protected natural areas or land-use zoning regulations—conservation objectives in stewardship initiatives are defined through bottom-up processes based on consensus.
From the perspective of commons scholarship, these agreements can be interpreted as institutional arrangements that collectively regulate the use and management of socio-ecological resources, helping to prevent overexploitation and degradation (Bollier & Helfrich, 2019). In this sense, land stewardship constitutes a hybrid governance regime in which private property coexists with practices of commoning, establishing mechanisms of cooperation, monitoring, and shared responsibility among landowners, social organizations, and local communities.
In practice, these agreements can adopt several forms: (a) the landowner retains management of the land while committing to conservation measures with technical support from the stewardship organization; (b) management is temporarily delegated to the stewardship organization while the owner retains certain usage rights; or (c) property ownership is transferred to the stewardship organization.
In all cases, these agreements are characterized by flexibility, the central role of trust between parties, and the adaptation of commitments to the ecological and social characteristics of each territory.
Land stewardship can take different forms depending on the ecosystems involved and the conservation objectives pursued, including marine, coastal, forest, urban, and agricultural stewardship. Among these, agricultural stewardship is one of the most widespread forms, as it lies at the intersection of food production, the protection of traditional landscapes, and nature conservation.
Within this model, farmers voluntarily commit to implementing a set of practices agreed upon with stewardship organizations, which in turn provide technical advice, monitoring, visibility, and institutional support. Common practices included in stewardship agreements to enhance the functioning of agroecosystems include the restoration of semi-natural habitats, the creation of small ponds, and the installation of nest boxes to support biodiversity. Other measures involve establishing and maintaining ecological corridors through the planting of hedgerows and flower strips along field margins and between crops; restoring elements of rural cultural heritage such as dry-stone walls, terraces, traditional hydraulic structures, and rural paths; promoting mosaic cropping systems; managing vegetative ground cover; and recovering local crop varieties. Stewardship organizations often facilitate access to funding sources and promote mechanisms for adding value to agricultural products through labeling systems that recognize conservation practices implemented on farms participating in stewardship agreements.
From a commons perspective, these initiatives can be interpreted as emerging forms of agrarian commoning, in which the management of productive landscapes is based on cooperative agreements that seek to reconcile agricultural activity with the maintenance of ecological functions and socio-environmental commons (Gibson-Graham et al., 2016). In this way, agricultural stewardship contributes to reconfiguring the relationships between production, property, and conservation, promoting hybrid governance arrangements in which private property coexists with collective practices oriented toward caring for the territory. It also challenges the intensive and extractivist models associated with industrial agriculture.
One of the main limitations to the development of land stewardship lies in the practical and legal challenges associated with land ownership regimes. In many cases, it is difficult to establish contact with owners of abandoned plots or to coordinate agreements among multiple landholders—including public institutions—particularly in ecologically interdependent spaces such as watersheds or riverbanks. This difficulty is compounded by the complexity of legal frameworks regulating land ownership and tenure, whose application is often poorly aligned with the public interest. These frameworks are based on principles of exclusion and enclosure and are embedded in a dominant economic-political model oriented toward individual profit, which hinders community-based initiatives seeking to counteract the ecological threats associated with private property.
This situation raises a key challenge for land stewardship: how can agreements be built that transcend the scale of individual plots when the passivity or lack of engagement of landowners hinders collective action? Moreover, the voluntary nature of stewardship agreements limits their scope when landowners are reluctant to commit to long-term conservation measures. In many cases, landholders prefer to maintain greater flexibility in land use so that they can adapt to market dynamics or modify land uses according to their economic interests (Sabaté et al., 2013). As a result, the implementation of conservation measures often depends on individual decisions regarding which environmental problems to address, for how long, and under what conditions (Solazzo et al., 2015).
These tensions reflect a deeper issue related to how contemporary legal systems conceptualize property rights over nature. To a large extent, these rights have been constructed from an anthropocentric perspective that privileges individual control and private—primarily economic—interests over ecological considerations or collective needs (Bosselman, 2011). Consequently, a structural tension emerges between the interdependent characteristics of ecosystems and the legal frameworks that regulate private land ownership (Solazzo et al., 2015).
In this sense, neoliberal approaches to property reinforce the centrality of individual rights while paying limited attention to the collective responsibilities associated with caring for common goods. As a result, the effectiveness of instruments such as land stewardship remains conditioned by the constraints imposed by existing property regimes. This context raises a fundamental question for environmental governance: what legal and institutional transformations would be necessary to ensure that conservation is not subordinated to private property rights?
Addressing this challenge requires moving toward a balance between private interests, societal needs, and responsibilities toward future generations and other species, with the aim of preserving the ecological integrity of ecosystems (Worrell & Appleby, 2000).
Ultimately, in contexts dominated by private property regimes, land stewardship can be understood as an emerging practice of commoning that challenges the primacy of individual control over land and rearticulates the relationship between property, ecological responsibilities, and the collective governance of nature.
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