Towards a right to the rural?

Abstract

Inspired by geographical work on the right to the city, there is nascent scholarly interest in a right to the rural. Given that the concept has proven useful in the urban context for both scholars and organizers, it is indeed worth considering its intellectual and political potential in the countryside. We survey the use of the right to the city by both scholars and social movements, as well as nascent efforts to apply this theoretical framework to rural areas. We proceed to argue that struggles over access to rural space are a compelling starting point for developing a right to the rural, highlighting along the way the increasing prominence of rentiership in shaping land control struggles. Drawing on three case studies of conflicts over access to rural space in the USA we argue that a right to the rural is a concept with potential, but also caution that it is not a panacea. It is open-ended, itself a site of struggle.

Keywords

Access property rent rights rural

Introduction

Struggles over rural land and resources have intensified around the world in the past three decades, as enclosures accelerate and new forms of rural rentiership emerge (Andreucci et al., 2017; Borras et al., 2011; Curley, 2021; Kay, 2017). Considering the tools geographers have at our disposal, we return to a provocative question posed by Laura Barraclough over a decade ago. Engaging with Lefebvre's concept of ‘the right to the city,’ she asked: ‘Is there also a right to the countryside?’ (Barraclough, 2013). While Barraclough resists the temptation for a simple answer, others have recently argued that the ‘right to the rural’ (Mair and Duffy, 2021) or the ‘right to be rural’ (Foster and Jarman, 2022; Weeden et al., 2022) is indeed a helpful analytic.¹ The right to the city has been one of the most generative conceptual developments in human geography of the past several decades, helping to catalyze scholarly debate and to connect this work to popular struggles. Thus, we believe that the concept of a right to the rural deserves serious attention. With an eye toward gauging the political-intellectual possibilities of such a project, this essay asks: What might a right to the rural mean? What might it do? What challenges, ambiguities, and openings remain?

The idea of a right to the rural, we suggest, has potential to help organize scholarly engagement with popular struggles. If built as a project to prioritize use value over exchange value and to redistribute decision-making to marginalized communities (including, at the radical horizon, control over the distribution of surplus capital), it could play an important role in liberatory projects to remake the rural. It could also help scholars better conceptualize and analyze a wide variety of rural issues, especially those related to the politics of property (Blomley, 2005) and land control (Peluso and Lund, 2011). Taking a cue from the right to the city literature, we focus our analysis on struggles over access to space. Our reasons for this choice are twofold. First, while rural access struggles are consistently acknowledged across the Global South (Borras et al., 2015; Mollett, 2006; Sikor and Lund, 2009), in the USA context where we live and research, they have recently been overshadowed by studies that focus more narrowly on ownership.² Second, we believe that access conflicts actually have considerable potential as a starting point for broader political movements (see, for instance, Hayes, 2020). Access struggles are, in fact, everywhere, their fundamental similarities obscured by the wide variety of differences among their protagonists. A right to the rural framing could help identify and catalyze emergent solidarities among these disparate conflicts, as well as analyze the tensions, ambiguities, and contradictions that shape them.

As with the right to the city, however, any right to the rural is inherently indeterminate. The concept is itself a site of struggle, not a panacea. Our choice to use the indefinite article ‘a’ (rather than the definite ‘the’) reflects our sense that the meaning of the concept is multiple and contested. Some of the most important questions that must be addressed by those wishing to develop the concept include: How might it differ from the right to the city? Can it transcend rather than reinforce the urban/rural divide? What kinds of rights does it imply and for whom? What are the strengths and limitations of using rights-based language? To address these abstract questions, it is also important to clarify the purpose of a right to the rural: Is it mostly useful as a rhetorical concept for inspiring and building popular movements? As a specific program of institutional/legal reform? Both? Or something else entirely? Rather than attempting to answer all of the above, we use case studies to reflect on the potential of a right to the rural to clarify struggles over access to rural space.

We begin with a review of four literatures with bearing on a right to the rural. First we give a brief genealogy of the right to the city, focusing on both scholarly and popular articulations. Second, we consider how this concept has been translated to the study of rural places. Third, we introduce work on enclosure and rentier capitalism in rural spaces, which provides the political-economic backdrop to the conflicts we describe. Finally, we argue that analysis of struggles over rural space benefits from centering issues of access and proffer a preliminary typology of rural access struggles. Finally, In the following section, we analyze three cases of access conflicts in the rural US for what they can tell us about a possible right to the rural. The first two cases – conservative backlash against private conservation easements and labor advocates’ efforts to access farms for organizing purposes – appear on the surface to be sharply at odds, but on closer inspection they reveal two different manifestations of a struggle for what might be called a right to the rural. In both cases we see an argument for use value over exchange value and for access to rural land for a population that goes beyond immediate inhabitants. However the third case – libertarian visions of local control over public lands – reveals the contradictions and ambiguities of popular movements for rural land access, especially the ways that they can be put towards an exclusionary communitarianism. We conclude with some preliminary thoughts on steps forward.

Theorizing the right to the rural

The right to the city

The concept of the right to the city has informed both scholarly debate and popular organizing, bringing these together in productive ways that few concepts achieve. We read this vast literature for the ways that it can inform our question about the conceptual development of a right to the rural, with specific attention to the relationship between scholarly and popular articulations.

The majority of the scholarship on the right to the city traces its inspiration to French philosopher Lefebvre's (1967) Le Droit à la Ville, which was first published in English in 1996.³ Although it is not always clear in Lefebvre's writings, he was in part responding to the wave of urban renewal projects in 1960s France and around the world, which razed working class and immigrant neighborhoods and replaced them with modernist housing and retail spaces (Merrifield, 2006). Close readings by Purcell (2002), Huchzermyer (2018), and others (Brenner et al., 2012) offer different interpretations of Lefebvre's project, but the most common theme that they draw from his work is an emphasis on the increasing dominance of exchange value over use value in urban life – essentially, the increasing privatization and commodification of the cityscape.⁴ The concept of the right to the city, in turn, is meant to inspire a re-prioritization of use value over exchange value, as well as a suite of related values: interpersonal encounter over individual consumption, interaction over segregation, and free activity/play over work (Purcell, 2014: 151).

It is also important to note that the articulation of a right to the city by the Brazilian Workers Party and urban reformers across the nation in the 1980s and 1990s arguably sparked the early twenty-first century scholarly return to Lefebvre's concept – indicating the potential of the concept to bridge popular and academic discourse. Advocates and organizers working to address the skyrocketing inequality in Brazilian cities explicitly drew on the language of the right to the city to insist on the public function of property, or, land uses that contribute to the common good (Purcell, 2014). This was eventually enshrined in Brazilian law in 2001 through the Statute of the Cities, which regulated urban governance and development policy. These changes have not revolutionized property relations in Brazil, but they have provided a mechanism for democratic control over land use planning and led to court decisions that affirmed the public interest in property, limiting the power of developers and landowners (Friendly, 2020).

In the first decade of the twenty-first century the right to the city became a rallying cry for many urban justice movements across the world, from Mexico City to Durban and beyond. These municipal movements took a variety of forms and agendas but they generally challenged neoliberal entrepreneurial urbanism and the power of developers over the city's poor and working class residents. Many of these movements took gentrification, housing and property as their central concerns, as well as access to public spaces more broadly. At the same time, decidedly less-radical NGOs and international institutions also adopted the language of the right to the city, articulating a different vision of what it might mean. Kuymulu (2013) argues that grassroots articulations promote an urbanism that works for the working class and identifies corporations and developers as the problem, while the United Nations and similar institutions promote ‘inclusive’ private development and strive for ‘balance’ between market growth and the needs of the poor. Several others have analyzed these different projects and highlight the importance of continued struggle over the meaning of the right to the city (Mayer, 2009).

As with the popular uses of the concept, scholarly projects employ the right to the city in a variety of (potentially incommensurable) ways. Part of the confusion about the concept arguably stems from Lefebvre's conceptualization which, like most of his philosophical work, is purposefully open-ended. In many ways, the scholarly debates on the right to the city are, even if only implicitly, structured around the distinction between distributive and procedural justice. As reflected and amplified in Mitchell's (2003) influential book, many of the turn-of-the-century articulations of the right to the city conceive of it as a demand for access to urban public space and housing – essentially a distributive justice concern. In this tradition, the politics of property, public space, and policing are understood as central objects of struggle for the poor and marginalized, perhaps even the foundational elements for other political possibilities. This work understands that procedural justice matters, of course, but it is not their primary concern. Meanwhile, influential scholarly interventions from Purcell (2003) and Harvey (2003, 2008) argue for more attention to the democratization of decision-making. Through a deep reading of Lefebvre's philosophical conception of rights, Purcell argues that they are a necessary challenge, not a supplement, to liberal notions of citizenship. Meanwhile Harvey emphasizes that the right to the city must mean more than access to housing and public space; for him, it entails radical urban governance in the form of the right to control the distribution of surplus capital.

Another key question – though one which has received little attention in the literature – is that of recognition: who is recognized as a legitimate rights-holder? For Lefebvre the answer was urban inhabitants. Consistent with his provocative claim that the defining capitalist dynamic of the contemporary moment was not industrialization but urbanization, Lefebvre also intended to broaden traditional Marxian understandings of the subject and site of politics beyond wage workers on the factory floor to urban-dwellers in general (Lefebvre, 1996). Lefebvre argued that ‘only the working class can become the agent…it gathers the interests (overcoming the immediate and the superficial) of the whole society and firstly of all those who inhabit’ (1996: 158, emphasis in original). He then expressly excluded the elite:

…the Olympians of the new bourgeois aristocracy no longer inhabit. They go from grand hotel to grand hotel, or from castle to castle, commanding a fleet or a country from a yacht…They transcend everyday life, possess nature, and leave it up to the cops to contrive culture. (1996: 159)

In our reading, the rest of the right to the city literature follows this by assuming that marginalized urban residents are the subjects of the right to the city (see Purcell, 2002 on ‘inhabitants’). But where does this focus on marginalized urban dwellers leave rural inhabitants?

Where is the rural?

The tensions that animate Barraclough's (2013) question about ‘how rural people fit into the right to the city?’ are relevant for all place-based rights claims. For instance, the fact that many of the resources and much of the labor that goes into the production of urban space comes from outside the city suggests the need to broaden the base of those who might claim a right to urban space. In addition to this direct metabolic argument, any notion of rights to mobility and migration also complicate a simple focus on inhabitants – whether urban, rural, or otherwise. Thus, we argue that any right to the rural should likewise take into account the rights of non-inhabitants – something that is especially clear when one considers the settler-colonial context of the USA, which we discuss more below.

While development of the concept of a right to the rural might be complementary to and synergistic with existing right to the city projects, it is also important to ask whether such a project simply reproduces an unhelpful urban/rural binary. Geographers have long debated the meaning, utility and limits of the spatial categories of urban and rural (Angelo, 2017; Ghosh and Meer, 2021; Van Sant et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2023). These terms can obscure more than they elucidate if used uncritically, and often spark agonistic politics where solidarity might instead be cultivated. Some long to move beyond these terms entirely (Ortega, 2022). However, others suggest that they remain useful or even necessary (Ozatagan and Eraydin, 2024). There are, for instance, long-standing political-intellectual traditions that indicate how careful attention to rural and urban relations yield significant insight (Gilmore, 2008; Hart and Sitas, 2004; Paprocki, 2020). Given the salience of these terms in everyday life, it is also arguable that discarding them would limit the potential for academic engagement with popular political struggles. For our purposes here, we believe that it is possible and useful to work with an open-ended concept of a right to rural space, while also analyzing through grounded case studies its openings and limits.

In many ways our conception of the rural aligns with that of Krause (2013) and Gillen et al. (2022), who see ‘ruralization’ as a complementary corrective to the epistemological dominance of the urban/urbanization. Rather than tearing down the urban/rural distinction or relying on the primacy of one concept, they understand them as simultaneous, linked and on-going processes. Building on this work, we employ a historical-geographical materialist conception of rural space. Simply put, rural places are landscapes dominated by extraction and production that are linked through logistics infrastructure to urban landscapes dominated by consumption (see, for instance, Neel, 2018). These linkages are continually re-articulated through everyday processes of economic production and social reproduction that form the essential context for understanding political struggles concerning everything from incarceration to pollution (Gilmore, 2007).

Several scholars have recently taken up the question of a right to the rural (or, a right to be rural). The numerous case studies from Canada and around the world in the volume edited by Foster and Jarman (2022) highlight the partial application of liberal rights and citizenship, focusing on the limited reach of public services, benefits and institutions in rural areas – from schools to health care and political representation. Weeden et al. (2022) use the concept to explore the tensions that emerge between residents and in-migrants in tourism-dependent rural regions in the USA and Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, Mair and Duffy (2021) ask who has the right, or at least the power, to represent a place through analysis of the ways that amenity migrants frame their new locale in rural New South Wales, Australia. Woods (2023: 3), meanwhile, calls for more research into ‘rural spatial justice,’ which would include, among other lines of inquiry, ‘analysis of the differentiated ability of individuals and social groups to access and live in certain spaces, and to participate in the reproduction of these spaces, recalling Lefebvre's “right to the city” and his linked “right to difference”’.

Though theoretically diverse, this nascent literature most often employs a political-economic conceptualization of rural space.⁵ Foster and Jarman (2022: 2), for instance, emphasize ‘economic globalization, restructuring and de-industrialization’ as drivers of rural dynamics. Simultaneously, much of this work highlights demographic change such as aging populations and amenity migration as defining features of rural space (Mair and Duffy, 2021; Weeden et al., 2022). Another thread connecting the nascent literature on a right to the rural is that it explicitly aims to support policy and planning reform. These are some of the concerns that animate the phrase ‘the right to be rural’: an appeal to policy-makers and planners for increasing support to struggling rural communities. While policy and planning audiences are important, we are more interested in articulations of a right to the rural for their potential to directly organize grounded movements.

The rural context: Enclosure and rentier capitalism

While relatively little scholarship has explicitly been framed in terms of a right to the rural, there is a substantial body of work within political ecology, critical agrarian studies and related fields that grapples with distributive spatial justice concerns in rural areas. The first quarter of the twenty-first century saw the start of a ‘global land grab’ which attracted considerable media and scholarly attention to rural land dispossession internationally (Borras et al., 2012). This wave of international enclosures is in fact highly differentiated. Those acquiring rural land include foreign corporations, financial institutions, governments, and non-profit organizations. Their methods run the gamut from violent dispossession to market purchase of private property to government-backed land concession. Their motivations are likewise varied, including farming, timber harvesting, mining, and water access, as well as, increasingly, ‘green grabbing’ for conservation, renewable energy production, or generation of carbon credits (IPES-Food, 2024; Wolford et al., 2024). This variability leads Peluso and Lund (2011) to argue that there is no single global land grab but rather many, sometimes contradictory ‘new frontiers of land control.’

The rural US has not been immune to the transfer and concentration of land ownership associated with the global land rush, but perhaps even more relevant to rural land access struggles in this geographical context is the rise of rentier capitalism. A spate of recent literature highlights the increasing prominence of rent–defined by Christophers (2020: xxiv) as ‘income derived from the ownership, possession or control of scarce assets under conditions of limited or no competition’–as a category of profit. Classically understood as stemming from land (Haila, 1990; Ward and Aalbers, 2016), rent today is frequently also generated by intangible assets such as intellectual property (Birch, 2020) and digital platforms (Sadowski, 2020). A substantial body of scholarship argues that rentier income has grown in importance since the 1970s, becoming more central to national economies, to corporate profits, and even to household incomes (Christophers, 2020; Mazzucato, 2018).⁶ Scholars with roots in Marxian theory understand this shift as stemming from a crisis of capitalism in which profits from industrial production stall, catalyzing a shift toward financial and other rentier forms of profit-making (cf. Arrighi, 1994; Harvey, 2003). As Zacares (2021: 48) puts it: ‘With growth slowing down to a trickle and productivity stagnating, it appears that accumulation is now less about making anything and more about simply owning something.’ Much has been written about how the increasing search for monopolizable assets from which to extract rentier income plays out in urban areas (Fields, 2018; Tapp, 2020), but this shift to rentier capitalism is also reshaping rural areas, with implications for farmland markets (Fairbairn, 2020; Ouma, 2020), the timber industry (Gunnoe, 2014), renewable energy infrastructure (Knuth, 2023), conservation efforts (Kay, 2017), and more. This is no surprise, given that the economic stagnation and declining industrial profitability credited with catalyzing the shift to rentier modes of profit have hit rural areas hard (Green, 2020).

Enclosure and extraction of rentier income are, in fact, deeply intertwined processes. Andreucci et al. (2017) describe them as two moments in a process of ‘value grabbing’ by which capitalists appropriate surplus value that they had no hand in producing: (1) the creation of new property rights which establishes rent relations in the first place (i.e. enclosures), and (2) struggles over the extent and distribution of the rent itself. The enclosures that make rent possible go beyond so-called primitive accumulation. The theft of Indigenous land and its transformation into private property for white ownership under settler colonialism formed a basis for future rounds of dispossession in North America (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2023; Ekers, 2019; Palmer, 2020; Shoemaker, 2020). In today's context of flagging late capitalism, however, enclosure includes the full range of predatory behaviors that Harvey (2003) describes as ‘accumulation by dispossession.’ In her study of rentier conservation in Maine, Kay (2017) shows that enclosure – and the subsequent generation of novel forms of rent – may simply take the form of restricting access to private property where it was formerly freely granted. Enclosure, in other words, takes the form not only of privatization but of exclusion from rural spaces and the community life they support – exactly the type of phenomenon that has long interested urban scholars invested in the right to the city.

Rentiership always entails political struggle. Rent represents a struggle over the distribution of surplus value. Whereas value is created in the labor process, rentiers capture some of the surplus value created. Thus, there is an inherent conflict between capitalists and rentiers; ultimately, rent relationships are the product of both intra- and inter-class struggle (Andreucci et al., 2017). The state plays a central role in mediating these conflicts and shaping the flows of rents. And of course, the state can itself be a rentier; in rural places, for instance, the state may be a significant landholder and charge fees for access to that land for recreation or extraction. But these are all general outlines and several important questions remain: Where do workers, non-owners, and smallholders fit in this political schema? And how do the political dynamics of rent articulate with other ideologies and struggles? These are questions that we take up in our case studies.

Why access?

Land control can take many forms. Peluso and Lund (2011: 668) define it as ‘practices that fix or consolidate forms of access, claiming, and exclusion for some time.’ In North America, however, recent scholarly conversations have tended to emphasize land control in the form of property ownership. This work highlights concentration of ownership along colonial and racial lines (Byrd et al., 2018; Horst and Marion, 2019; Shoemaker, 2020), the role of ownership in farm size increases (Magnan et al., 2023), absentee ownership (Desmarais et al., 2017; Purifoy, 2022), and the financialization of ownership (Fairbairn, 2020; Gunnoe, 2014). Taking inspiration from global South work on land access and the right to the city literature on access to space we look beyond ownership to struggles over access. Although access is sometimes defined quite broadly – as in Ribot and Peluso’s (2003: 153) definition of it as ‘the ability to derive benefits from things’ – here we use it in the more narrow and colloquial sense of the ability to enter and use physical space.

The dominant emphasis on ownership in the USA reflects a preoccupation deeply ingrained in capitalist cultures. Like many other Western liberal democracies, the USA espouses a Blackstonian model of property, also sometimes referred to as a classical or ownership model (Blomley, 2005; Calo et al., 2023). This model reduces property to individually owned private property and emphasizes the owner's right to exclude others and to use that property in absolutely any way he sees fit (Blomley, 2005; MacPherson, 1975). In the early twentieth century, property was reconceptualized as a ‘bundle of rights’ – a set of legal relationships between people in relation to things (Baron, 2013) – but the idea of property as sovereign domain of the free individual unhampered by any social claims on his property use remained culturally dominant in the USA (Blomley, 2005; Calo et al., 2023; Graham and Shoemaker, 2022), and the right to exclude came to be seen as one of the most vital sticks or strands in the property bundle (Anderson, 2006; Harris, 1993). This model of ownership is itself a social construct, however, and not one that describes reality particularly well. It is more accurately seen as a hegemonic imaginary which ‘obscures the varied and inventive ways in which property actually gets put to work in the world’ (Blomley, 2005: 27).

Most importantly for our purposes, the dominant ownership model obscures the prevalence and importance of access. Dwelling in the shadow of ownership, access can be hard to glimpse, yet it is omnipresent, protected by formal rights as well as informal community norms, subject always to expansion or contraction. Berger (2023) argues that, historically as well as today, the ‘right to enter’ has appeared alongside the ‘right to exclude’ as a crucial part of the property rights bundle. The right to enter serves to protects the state from excessive enforcement costs by allowing entry where it is expected anyway by local custom, it upholds the public good by limiting monopoly rights where their outcomes would be inefficient or unjust (e.g., when access rights allow for more efficient transportation routes), and it allows the state to protect the public from possibly unjust actions of the owners (e.g., allowing health and safety inspectors onto a property) (Berger, 2023). Entry rights abound: one may enter private property to protect oneself or others, the navigable waters through and airspace above properties are largely open for public access, and a whopping 24 US states allow for hunting on private land as long as ‘no trespassing’ signs have not been posted (Berger, 2023). The reality of private property, in short, is much more porous and less exclusionary than it appears in the popular imagination.

In the case studies that follow, we examine rural struggles over land through the lens of access. There are, we believe, strong arguments for doing so. First, by focusing on ownership concentration and struggles, studies may unintentionally reinforce the dominant view of private property ownership as the totality of rural life. Conversely, exploring the possibilities of access may help to validate non-dominant relationships to land and illuminate some of the possibilities that already exist within dominant property relations. Secondly, focusing on ownership alone narrows the field of struggle for rural social movements. In the USA, the sanctity of private property acts as a major ideological barrier to movements for redistributive land reform (Roman-Alcala, 2024). Expanding the scope of struggle beyond the private property binary of owner/non-owner, however, opens up myriad possibilities around when space can be used, by whom, and for what purposes. Removing the blinders of ownership therefore actually results in much more to contest. It may even be the case that land access struggles can be the thin end of the wedge, opening the door to a host of other political concerns (Shoemaker, 2024).

The lens of access also has potential to unite a great many rural movements which can otherwise seem disparate and incompatible. We identify at least five types of rural access struggle. There is access for recreation, some of the most common being hiking, boating, hunting and fishing (Roane, 2022). There is access for mobility, to allow for more direct routes across private property (Thorogood et al., 2022), a category which might also include recent legal conflicts over drone access to low airspace over property. There is access for subsistence, including for hunting and gathering but also simply for space to live, in cases ranging from unhoused encampments to cooperative community farms (Emery and Pierce, 2005; Freshour and Williams, 2022). There is access for cultural uses, such as access to landmarks, burial sites, and other locations of cultural importance (Middleton, 2011; Newfont, 2012). Finally, there is access for regulatory oversight, which occurs when the government or third parties are permitted to access private property for purposes of health and safety inspections, to ensure compliance with environmental regulations, and more (Berger, 2023). Access struggles are actually quite prominent and popular, within and across a wide variety of identities and ideologies. Demands for access seem to resonate widely in a way that demands for redistribution of land ownership or assertion of social control over capital do not in the present day US context. This makes access a potentially powerful starting point for challenging what can otherwise seem like a one-way ratchet of enclosure and rent extraction.

Access cases

In what follows, we explore the possibilities for a right to the rural through three land access case studies. These involve, respectively, (1) public access to private conservation easements, (2) labor advocates’ access to farmworkers on private land, (3) and libertarian claims to access federal resource lands. The first is a formal administrative conflict, the second is a legal case, and the third is a popular conflict at the grassroots. We chose these cases because they showcase the widely divergent political values that can attend access claims, and it was only after digging deeper into them that we realized each also highlights the role of rentiership as a key axis of land control struggles. Together they help us think through the dynamics of the current conjuncture as well as the potential and the limits of a right to the rural.

Conservation easements

Private conservation easements are voluntary legal agreements whereby private landowners waive specific development rights in exchange for tax benefits (usually a federal income tax deduction and a reduction of local property taxes). Conservation easements are attached to the property deed in perpetuity, meaning that even if the land changes hands the restrictions remain. Conservation easements grew in prominence in the 1980s as a compromise between liberal environmentalists and large landowners in the context of the Reagan administration's anti-public lands campaign. They have grown dramatically in popularity across the nation, to the point that they are now the most commonly used strategy for protecting lands from development (Cheever and McLaughlin, 2015). As voluntary mechanisms that provide financial incentives for land conservation while protecting the primacy of private property rights, they are broadly popular across the political spectrum in the USA.

Despite the broad popular support for private conservation easements, they are under increasing scrutiny from scholars and policy experts. Critics point out that they provide regressive tax benefits (Kay, 2016); they rely on public funds but are governed largely by private nonprofit organizations (Morris, 2008); and they reinforce the primacy of exclusive private ownership by establishing a new rent for landowners (Kay, 2017). Finally, critics also object to the fact that public funds (tax revenue) are used for private land conservation which doesn’t necessarily increase public access (Van Sant et al., 2021). Put another way: wouldn’t it be better to use public funds to secure public conservation lands that can be more broadly enjoyed?

The politics of the debates over conservation easements are more complex than one might first expect. Liberal environmentalists have remained a key supporter of conservation easements from the 1980s into the present. Federal legislators from both parties have arguably grown even more united in their support since the 1980s, voicing virtually no public criticism and continually increasing funding for conservation easements. After a couple of decades of studying and tweaking the programs, some environmental and tax professionals have publicly raised concerns about the structure and governance of conservation easements, most often relying on utilitarian arguments about cost-benefit ratio. It is populists and libertarians (mostly of the conservative kind) who have been the most vocal critics of conservation easements in popular discourse, and much of their objection is tied to the issue of public access.

For instance, in 2017 a small group of Republican state legislators from the rural Appalachian region of South Carolina (commonly referred to as the ‘Upstate’) launched a campaign to reform conservation funding in the state. Their main target was the South Carolina Conservation Bank, which used tax revenue from land transfers to help fund conservation easements for private landowners. The Upstate Republican lawmakers argued that there was inadequate oversight of the Bank resulting in an ad hoc process of conservation that allocated too much public funding to large private landowners. To remedy this they proposed placing the Bank under the control of the state Department of Natural Resources and mandating that funds be used to increase public access to conservation lands.

In response, environmental groups across the state launched a coordinated effort to defend the status quo – particularly in the liberal Upstate enclave of Greenville. For instance, a commentary in the Upstate Greenville News co-authored by a land trust executive director and the president of a real estate development firm simply asserted that private land conservation was necessary for protecting the state's ‘beautiful, biologically rich, and historically rich’ places from development – avoiding entirely the issue of access raised by the Upstate conservatives (Aughtry and Wyche, 2017). The Greenville Journal also ran a similar opinion piece co-authored by a local insurance executive and a lawyer simply titled ‘The SC Conservation Bank must be reauthorized.’ It opened with the threat posed by ‘astonishing’ population growth to the state's ‘special places,’ and asserted that ‘without the Conservation Bank the chances of losing them greatly increase’ (Bannister and Turner, 2017). In keeping with broader liberal tendencies, the authors of this piece simply ignored the populist Upstate priority on promoting public access to conservation lands.

Like right to the city advocates, the conservative critics of private conservation easements highlight a lack of distributive justice in the allocation of public space and of procedural justice in the way decisions about that space are being made. Thus, while not a smooth or simple project, it is possible to articulate these critiques with those from more explicitly left positions in both urban and rural places. Failing to do so cedes important political ground.

Labor rights

Another case of demand for access to rural private property unfolds in a very different political context: farmworker justice. Here the protagonists are labor rights advocates and farmworker service providers, who argue that they should be allowed to enter private workplaces in order to inform, organize, and serve workers. Whereas critiques of conservation easements tend to come from the political right, these arguments come from liberals and the left, yet they have some strong parallels.

The most prominent example of this type of conflict comes from California. In 1975, California passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA), making it the first US state to guarantee the right of collective bargaining to farmworkers. Farm labor had been intentionally excluded from the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 by the Roosevelt administration to win support from Southern state politicians who wanted to ensure that Black plantation laborers remained vulnerable to exploitation, as well as from subsequent minimum wage, workers compensation, and unemployment insurance laws (Perea, 2011). Beginning in the mid-1960s, the United Farm Workers (UFW), under the leadership of César Chavez, drew national attention to unjust working conditions faced by the predominantly Latino and Filipino farmworkers of California via a series of highly publicized strikes and boycotts. This struggle for fair working conditions sometimes turned violent, as growers who wanted to avoid unionization by the UFW signed ‘sweetheart’ deals with the teamsters union, whose members attacked striking UFW members (Shaw, 2008). The ALRA attempted to address this volatile situation by formally giving farmworkers the right to unionize and bargain collectively, creating a process for union elections and an Agricultural Labor Relations Board to conduct and certify those elections. The purpose of the act, as described in its preamble was ‘to ensure peace in the agricultural fields by guaranteeing justice for all agricultural workers and stability in labor relations’ (ALRB, 1978: 1).

One of the first things the new California Agricultural Labor Relations Board did was to adopt regulations which allowed labor organizers to access farmland for the purposes of organizing workers. The board found that, with workers frequently housed in barracks on site, union organizers lacked off-farm channels to communicate with workers and inform them of their rights, making it necessary for them to speak with workers on the farm itself. It therefore granted unions the right to access private farm properties to speak with workers. These rights were subject to various limits: the organizers had to provide advance notice of their intent to enter; they could only speak to workers during the hour before work, the hour after work, and the lunch hour; they could only enter for up to four, thirty-day periods per year; and they were prohibited from engaging in any disruptive activities while on farm (Berger, 2023). This regulation acknowledges that access to private property is sometimes necessary in the interests of social justice. It places the use value of the property – as the only space in which many workers can be reached to learn about their rights – over its exchange value as a piece of real estate or site of capitalist production.

This right of access has faced regular legal challenges. Until recently, however, it has been consistently upheld. In response to a 1976 challenge, the California Supreme Court reaffirmed that this policy was ‘designed to benefit the public as a whole.’ The decision went on to state that, ‘It should scarcely be necessary, as we enter the last quarter of the twentieth century, to reaffirm the principle that all private property is held subject to the power of the government to regulate its use for the public welfare’ (Mosk and Clark, 1976). In 2015, California Agricultural Labor Relations Board held hearings on the policy and found it as necessary as ever. Farmworkers, the board concluded, had reasonable fear of employer retaliation, low literacy rates, limited internet access, and often spoke Indigenous languages rather than Spanish or English, all of which meant that they were still profoundly unaware of their rights to organize and in need of direct outreach at the farm (Sobel and Blanco, 2015). In 2021, however, a new challenge to the policy reached the US Supreme Court with a very different outcome. In the 2021 case of Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, the court with its new conservative super-majority ruled that such access rights constituted a 'taking’ – a government seizure of private property for public use which requires ‘just compensation’ under the 5th and 14th amendments to the constitution. In short, the court's decision asserted, contra existing precedent, that the right to exclude is so fundamental a component of private property that the state must provide monetary remuneration if it wishes to require even qualified access.

The California case is not an isolated one. In 2021, Colorado passed Senate Bill 87, which, beginning in 2022, required farm access for not only labor organizers, but other key service providers for farmworkers, including health care providers, promotoras and other community health workers, attorneys, legal advocates, members of the clergy, consular representatives, and more (Colorado State Senate, 2021). In this case, the law states that farmworkers cannot be prevented from receiving these service providers as visitors in their employee-provided housing when they are themselves at home. This law passed in the same year as the Cedar Point decision and was, of course, immediately subject to legal challenge on the grounds that it violated the new Supreme Court precedent (Farm Bureau Colorado, 2022). The farm and ranch owner plaintiffs in this case are a potpourri of corporate, limited liability acronyms – for example, Talbott Land and Property LLLP, Marc Arnusch Farms LLC – serving as a potent reminder of just how far rural landowners have already buttressed their right to profit against challenges in the public interest.

The Cedar Point case constitutes a notable attack on what we might conceptualize as a right to the rural. In the Cedar Point case we see the right to exclude raised – to an unprecedented degree – above the equally important and longstanding right to enter (Berger, 2023). At the same time, the exchange value of the land as a source of private agricultural profit making is elevated above its use value as a site of labor rights and human welfare. Cedar Point also creates a new rent. In overturning decades of precedent to declare union access to farms a taking, it puts a price on access rights – in this case a fee paid by labor advocates to private landowners. As in the case of conservation easements to ensure long standing recreational access rights (Kay, 2017), this decision amounts to a kind of enclosure that creates a new monopoly rent. As in the example of private conservation easements the new rental income accrues to private landowners, fortifying the power of the landowning class. Notably, it does so against both the rural working poor (migrant farmworkers) and the often non-local labor advocates (union organizers, health care workers, legal representatives, etc.) whose access rights are being restricted.

Bundy occupations

The politics of the two previous cases might seem at odds, in the sense that the critiques are articulated by avowedly conservative politicians in the first instance and from left/liberal labor advocates in the second. However, they are both an expression of the same phenomenon: popular demands for increased rural land access in the face of ongoing pressure to further enclose it in the interests of extracting new forms of rent. Thus, even when voiced by conservative politicians, this populist argument can articulate in productive ways with leftist concerns. Of course, this is not the case for all popular arguments for increased rural land access. The now-infamous Bundy land occupations of 2014 and 2016 highlight this tension (see also Inwood and Bonds, 2017). In particular, they illustrate the importance of clarifying – through struggle – who might claim a right to the rural and under what circumstances.

In 2014, Cliven Bundy, a white cattle rancher from Nevada, led an armed resistance movement to federal regulation of public grazing lands; two years later his son Ammon Bundy, an Arizona businessman, led an armed occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon (Wang, 2018). Both of these were highly-publicized and rather drawn-out affairs that absorbed public attention for weeks. The Bundy occupations seem generally informed by the Wise Use movement of the 1980s and ‘90 s in the rural US West, which consisted of ‘efforts by rural commodity producers to maintain their historical, privileged access to and control over the federally owned lands in the region’ (McCarthy, 2002: 1282). But more specifically, the twenty-first-century Bundy occupations articulated religious fundamentalism, right-wing libertarianism and nationalist populism into a radical anti-federal government stance. They demanded the effective removal of federal resource management agencies from the US West and the eventual privatization of these public lands. Strikingly, in the case of both Bundy occupations, government authorities employed largely non-confrontational enforcement tactics and did not charge them with trespassing, a response that stood in stark contrast to the militarized responses and harsh criminal trespassing sentences faced by Indigenous activists and others protesting fossil fuel pipeline construction near Standing Rock Reservation in 2016 (Estes, 2019; Graham and Shoemaker, 2022).

While nominally a protest focused on federal government overreach, rentier dynamics also played a crucial role in the Bundy occupations. Cliven Bundy's most specific objection, for instance, was to the permit fees charged by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for grazing access on federal lands. In this case the rents (grazing fees) were longstanding and the rentier was actually the government, not private landowners. Even though the BLM has long charged fees for ranchers to access federal grazing lands, the recent increase in rentier dynamics has also reshaped the rural US West more broadly. Investment in rent-bearing assets is often capital's response to declining profitability across industrial sectors – from manufacturing to livestock production. As Neel (2018) argues, this has led to increased dependence on federal jobs and benefits across the US West and, for some, increased resentment towards the federal government. Many of the right-wing populist movements in the USA (and abroad) are filled with angry and disillusioned supporters who feel (and often are) left behind as industrial agriculture, mining, forestry, and livestock production give way to rentier capitalism. They long for a return to the communitarian's mythical ‘real economy.’ This dynamic fuels supporters of the Bundy occupations, for whom the land occupations are a masculinist rejection of a sense of rent-fueled dependency (Neel, 2018).

The Bundy occupations trouble simplistic understandings of a right to the rural in two related ways. First, there is the question of the Bundys’ class position. The Bundy's are smallholders and petty capitalists with long-standing status in the region, but the declining profitability of industrial production – and arguably tightened environmental regulations – have indeed put pressure on their livelihoods and those of many of their neighbors. Are they the ‘Olympians of the new bourgeois aristocracy’ that Lefebvre denied the status of ‘inhabitant’? Maybe, but most likely they fall somewhere between marginalized/working class and elite, highlighting the vexing question of who gets to claim a right to the rural. The distinction between use/exchange value is a helpful starting point for addressing this tension, in the sense that the Bundy's are essentially capital's tragic commoner: they want to extract exchange value from public lands without even minimal social obligations. Second, this case also highlights the tendency for populist movements to downplay difference in their assertion of a singular common interest. Even if these populist land occupations were entirely working-class movements, they would not be organically bound by one common interest (see, for instance, McCarthy and Hague, 2004). Indigenous critique makes this especially clear: even similarly-marginalized communities can and, in fact, often do have divergent interests and desires (Daigle and Ramirez, 2019; Dunbar-Ortiz, 2006). The most obvious example of this is the fact that the Bundy's claim that ‘the people’ are the rightful owners of federal lands was premised on the obfuscation and denial of over a century of Indigenous claims and struggle (Goldstein, 2018). The powerful objections to the Bundy's claim from Indigenous groups was a key part of broader reactions to the occupations (Keeler, 2021). Just as the Bundy's claim to be ‘of the people’ is articulated in and through the project of settler colonialism, so is their anti-rentier politics. This is a tension that movements for increased access to rural space must confront. Thus, while the Bundy case prominently involves a struggle to preserve land access in the face of rent extractions (as with the two above), we see it as a counterpoint, a word of caution about how popular claims to access rural space by local residents do not necessarily contribute to broader liberatory projects. Ultimately, it reminds us that scholarly elaboration of a right to the rural must analyze the tensions, ambiguities and contradictions in popular movements, rather than assuming righteous coherence.

Conclusion

If abolitionists are, first and foremost, committed to the possibility of full and rich lives for everybody, then that would mean that all kinds of distinctions and categorisations that divide us – innocent/guilty; documented/not; Black, White, Brown; citizen/not-citizen – would have to yield in favor of other things, like the right to water, the right to air, the right to the countryside, the right to the city, whatever these rights are. – Ruth Wilson Gilmore⁷

We take Gilmore's exhortation above as inspiration for concluding reflections and future directions, in at least three ways. First, like much of her work, it emphasizes that those concerned with liberatory change must work to connect disparate peoples, places and movements – to struggle with and through the inherent challenges in doing so. Second, it suggests that efforts to develop a complementary right to the rural might play an important role in these projects. Finally, and most broadly, it counters those who reject rights as inherently limited. For, despite the compelling critiques of ‘rights-talk,’ we argue that the right to the city highlights the potential of such concepts to spark scholarly and political momentum.⁸ It is even possible that working with and through the language of rights, rather than avoiding it, is necessary for rearticulating existing conceptions of political claims, obligations, and belonging.

The three cases we have described highlight the recurring nature of enclosure and conflicts over access to rural space but also their evolving dynamics, especially in the context of increasing rentiership. While we have focused on the rural US, we believe that similar dynamics are present around the world. We can’t speculate on how well a right to the rural would travel, but we do suggest that it could be a useful analytic for understanding the similarities and differences between struggles across the Global North and South. We see real potential in popular calls for increased access to rural space. For instance, articulating the populist critique of private conservation easements to calls for labor advocacy on private farmland could strengthen each, building new solidarities and political subjects explicitly oriented towards liberatory goals.

In particular, these cases highlight the question of ‘whose rights’? Whether urban or rural, focusing solely on the rights of inhabitants enables exclusionary politics. The Bundy land occupations clearly highlight the potential for these calls to slip into an exclusive communitarianism. Those wishing to elaborate the concept of place-based rights need to address this tendency more explicitly. Similarly, our focus on US-based cases highlights another important intellectual and political knot: the meaning, potential and pitfalls of land access struggles in a settler colonial context. While settler attempts to ally with and support Indigenous land claims are always fraught (Bosworth, 2022; Jacroux and Freshour, 2024), it is important to ask how popular movements for increased rural land access might better acknowledge and address these tensions.

Ultimately, we argue that the concept of a right to the rural, like its urban counterpart, might provide a language for both scholars and organizers to analyze the strategies for connecting disparate movements – the most promising strategies as well as those to avoid. In the best-case scenario the language of a right to the rural could also help connect movements across the urban/rural divide: with shared language it is easier to see shared struggles.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Levi Van Sant

Madeleine Fairbairn

Notes

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