Project Details
Projekt
Ethical issues in agricultural land markets
Applicant
Professor Dr. Vladislav Valentinov
Subject Area
Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Policy, Agricultural Sociology
Term
from 2017 to 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 317374551
Agricultural land markets in the countries under investigation are marked by the dramatic increase of land prices and rents, the growing role of non-agricultural investors, the emergence of large-scale holding structures, and the increasing demand for the conversion of agricultural land to non-agricultural uses. Each of these trends is often felt to have moral significance. The present subproject is aimed at explicating this significance, exploring the possibilities and limits of public regulation of agricultural land markets, and developing conceptual tools to address moral dilemmas whose complexity runs up against the limits of regulatory instruments. This subproject explores the contrast between the economic and non-economic standpoints to assessing the performance of agricultural land markets. While the utilitarian vision of land buttresses the economic standpoint, a number of currently prevailing land market policy goals in Germany and other EU countries stretch the limits of the utilitarian thinking. The promotion of the broad dispersion of land ownership, the control of the rise of prices and rents, and priority of agricultural uses of agricultural land are cases in point. Moreover, in cases of trade-offs between economic efficiency and alternative moral criteria, such as social and ecological sustainability, the utilitarian doctrine will tend to questionably prioritize efficiency at the cost of downplaying various sustainability concerns. While various instruments can be used to make the price mechanism more responsive to such goals, there are no guarantees that these instruments are sufficient. It is for this reason that the contrast between the economic and non-economic standpoints remains an urgent and ongoing task, both for practice and theory.The subproject-s strategy is to draw on Niklas Luhmann-s theory of Autopoietic social systems which maintain a precarious relationship to their environment, societal and natural alike. The prime example of such a system is the land market that exhibits considerable autonomy from the societal and natural environments and thus is prone to overstraining their carrying capacities. The political and legal systems hold the potential to forestall this overstraining but are subject to autopoietic closure of their own. In the first step of the work program, an ethical mapping exercise will be undertaken to take full account of the existing utilitarian and non-utilitarian explanations of agricultural land markets. In the second step, discourse analysis methods will be applied to stakeholder interviews as well as to the selected German mass media. The third step involves the organization of stakeholder workshops in the formats informed by the critical systems heuristics and the integrative propositional analysis. In the last step, the previous results will be summarized and elaborated in the construction of the social fabric matrix.
DFG Programme
Research Units
