Infrastructures of Farmland Valuation in Australia

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article investigates how valuation practices change as land becomes financialised in Australia. Financial investors bring their own assumptions on how land value should be ‘measured’ to enhance its fungibility as a financial asset. Importantly, this includes a shift to a ‘future income’ approach to value, which produces frictions with established land valuation practices. Combining valuation and infrastructure studies, I examine how conceptualisations of value; techniques of standardisation, classification and comparison; devices for measuring and calculating; templates and databases; social networks and relationships; as well as multiple materialities facilitate, legitimise and stabilise land value. These infrastructures of value are crucial for making new conceptualisations of value productive while both enabling and limiting change in valuation practices. Value further emerges as an important infrastructure itself. Shared understandings of value, embedded and expressed in valuation infrastructures, work as a ‘conduit’, a mechanism necessary for people to come to agreements in exchange processes.