Call for Papers: Ideology, Power and Expertise in the Political Economy of Land Policy
For a Panel at the ECPR General Conference 2025 Section: The Return of Land Politics: New Imaginaries, Debates, and Challenges, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 26 – 29 August 2025
Please submit your abstract (max. 500 words) to Edward Shepherd (
Abstract: Land policy sets the regulatory framework for governing the ownership, use, development and distribution of land and land value. It therefore performs a central coordinating and structuring role in the political and economic organisaton of societies. The design of land policy and the practices it shapes can be conditioned not only by technical expertise, but also by ideological preference and various economic ideas. Which ideologies, economic logics and forms of expertise are legitimised via land policy, and to what distributional effect, is therefore deeply political.
Despite this, land policy can sometimes be represented as a complex, technocratic and specialist area navigable only by experts. This can serve to obfuscate the underlying politics that shape it and excludes communities from understanding and engaging in political decisions that can significantly influence their welfare. This can be true, for example, of some forms of urban planning regulation and land taxation. However, other forms of land policy display their politics much more clearly and are more visible to the general public – such as via debates concerning land redistribution and indigenous land rights, for example.
Given the growing pressures on land deriving from climate change, population expansion, financialization and urbanisation, increasing demands are being placed on land policy, policy-makers and politicians. This is serving to further politicise land policy and the policy-making process. It also has the potential to challenge and disrupt settled ideological assumptions concerning land, property and its regulation, to create political ruptures via which new forms can emerge. However, in all cases there will be similar political questions to navigate. These include what is considered legitimate expertise in relation to more fundamental political questions concerning justice, the role of the state and the interaction of different forms of property with freedom.
This Panel invites scholars to critically examine these interconnections, fostering an agenda that bridges disciplinary boundaries in political science, geography, planning, sociology, history, and beyond. We are therefore open to a range of theoretical, methodological and normative perspectives applied in different empirical contexts. We are particularly interested in papers examining how ideological frameworks intersect with political-economic imperatives and claims of expertise to shape land policy and distributional outcomes. However, we welcome papers on any topic broadly related to this call. Examples include:
- What is the ideological role of different forms of land policy in the broader political-economy?
- What is the relationship between political ideology and adjustments in land policy?
- What is the political-economic role of complexity in relation to the politics of land policy?
- How do experts mediate, reconcile or displace ideological and political-economic tensions in the formulation and implementation of land policies?
- What role do competing forms of expertise (e.g. local knowledge, indigenous practices, technocratic approaches) play in shaping land policy, and how are these conflicts shaped by broader ideological and political-economic structures?
