Narrating values, persuading government: The unsettled stories of agricultural land ownership in the rural Canadian Prairies

Abstract

Global conflicts over land grabbing, financialization, and conservation have generated resistance from diverse local peoples who insist that land must be more than a commodity; it has social, cultural, and ecological value alongside its economic productivity. Saskatchewan’s government has recently responded to similar conflicts over investment, privatization, and concentration of landholding, by engaging in public consultations on farmland ownership. Analyzing comments from public consultation surveys in 2015 and 2017, the paper employs insights from property theory, legal studies, geography, and scholarship on storytelling to analyze how respondents' values, expressed through stories, work to change or maintain property relations.As a resource, agricultural land is endowed with value that changes over time and space. Land tenure regimes consist of shifting social relations regarding this resource, and these relations are often arrived at and maintained through persuasive narratives framed through social value claims about heritage, identity, livelihoods, and community norms. These stories also have a material effect on resource use and property regimes. In Saskatchewan, as survey respondents employ stories to influence policy decisions on agricultural land tenure and advocate for the status quo, they utilize social values that justify their entitlements. Alternative property relations, advocated or proposed by some respondents, provide more fundamental challenges to absolutist notions of private property rights and thus face ideological barriers to acceptance and implementation through policy. However, telling different stories can be a way to alter property relations.