Place in legal geography: Agency and application in agriculture research

Abstract

Systemic failure of our land management, legal, and regulatory institutions is revealed by the serious and adverse social and environmental impacts of land use practices in private agriculture, evident in severe land and water degradation, precipitous decline in biodiversity, and reduced resilience to natural hazards and climate change. The efficacy of the standard treatment of environmental law and regulation is often hampered by the cultural and legal priority of property rights. We take a different approach, using legal geography to refocus attention on the salience and agency of place and responses to degradation, such as conservation farming and regenerative agriculture, which are reforming dominant land management cultures and institutions from within. By recognising the role of place in leading geographically responsive land use decision‐making and more sustainable, resilient, and productive agricultural practices, an alternative model of private land ownership may be possible, as well as greater environmental sustainability. For researchers, our approaches too must be sensitive and responsive to place agency and our methodologies must evolve to acknowledge the agency of place. Place agency in legal geography has great potential for application in reforming suboptimal industrial agricultural practices and legal models of property ownership, and also for revitalising our scholarship.

Progressive and critical legal geography scholarship

“…Using qualitative software to scrutinise policy plus in‐depth interviews, their analysis suggests an approach that can be adopted by policymakers in assessing more‐than‐human impacts. In their work, there is a neat alignment with a call to both “foreground place and decentre the human” made by Bartel and Graham (2023, p. 3). In this instance, legal geographers are applying their skills and insights to tackle problems associated with biodiversity crises.…”

“…More traditional case studies may need to be reimagined as place studies, to foreground place agency and decentre the human. (Bartel & Graham, 2023, p. 3)…”

Insights from Antipodean legal geography: Building an environmental legal geography scholarship

“…Antipodean legal geography scholarship, using case studies from places where legal pluralism continues, helps to shape a narrative about the need to pay careful attention to local conditions. In this scholarship, the dynamic materiality of place gives rise to active place-making (Bartel and Graham, 2023).…”

“…Antipodean legal geography makes distinctive contributions to the field of legal geography by untangling a range of messy encounters where law and people become enmeshed within dynamic, material land and waterscapes. We argue that an Antipodean perspective draws out imbricated law and people connections (Braverman, 2014) with an emphasis on the power of place-making (Bartel and Graham, 2023). We are, in our collective efforts, working towards ‘de-provincializing’ Western law (Nicolini, 2022) and our aim is to highlight ALG’s key contributions towards the global legal geography project.…”

Geography: Do we advocate enough for the discipline and profession in terms of public policy?

“…I will not steal their thunder by summarising the papers here, because that is done comprehensively in their own editorial. What I will point out, however, is that every paper in the collection makes specific and important inroads into pressing public policy challenges related to agricultural research (Bartel & Graham, 2023), bushfire management strategies (Lange & Gillespie, 2023), biodiversity loss (Carr, 2023), shale gas developments (Sherval, 2023), and environmental contamination (Legg & Prior, 2023).…”