A groundbreaking European Research Council (ERC) Synergy Grant has been awarded to four eminent scholars—Professors Jun Borras, Esteve Corbera, Ian Scoones, and Anna Tsing—hailing from leading universities across the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Denmark. The project, titled Land and Life in the Anthropocene: Landscape Reform (LAND), embarks on an ambitious five-year research journey funded with €8.33 million. It centrally addresses an existential, interdisciplinary question that transcends academia: how can humanity cultivate new ways of coexisting on a rapidly transforming Earth amid profound ecological, social, and political change?
This initiative marks a significant conceptual departure from conventional land reform discourses by introducing the innovative notion of landscape reform. Unlike traditional models that focus primarily on redistributing land ownership and use, LAND reimagines the entire relationship between humans and the multispecies worlds they inhabit. The project posits that sustainable and just transformations must account for the intricate interplay among social systems, economic structures, and ecological processes, recognizing the “more-than-human” lives intertwined within landscapes. This multidisciplinary vantage point pushes beyond territorially confined perspectives, embracing a holistic understanding of landscapes as dynamic, lived environments shaped by and shaping human and non-human actors alike.
LAND operates in four ecologically and culturally distinct regions: the Colombian Amazon, the southern African savannas, the Mediterranean plains, and the coastal zones of Southeast Asia. This geographic diversity enables scholars to investigate a broad spectrum of land-use challenges and adaptive strategies. Across these sites, the project explores how land, livelihoods, and ecosystems might be reorganized to foster resilience, equity, and sustainability in the face of planetary crises. The focus on varying biomes and social contexts also allows the team to generate transferable frameworks that reflect the heterogeneous realities of global landscape governance under climate change pressure.
At the conceptual core of the research lies the intersection of four critical dimensions, known as the “4 Ps”: Planet, Profit, Property, and Partners. This innovative framework illuminates how global forces of power, economic production, and ownership arrangements shape the possibilities for just landscape transformation. By analyzing these interdependencies, the researchers interrogate how profit motives interface with ecological limits and property regimes, while also highlighting the importance of collaborative partnerships across different scales and sectors. The explicit attention to partners foregrounds the role of diverse actors, from local communities to policymakers, in co-creating sustainable futures.
LAND’s conceptual innovation also stems from its challenge to dominant Western dualisms that separate humans from nature and land from society. This decentering provokes a profound re-thinking of the ontological assumptions underpinning landscape politics. Rather than adopting a solely top-down planetary perspective, the project emphasizes situated, grounded knowledge and participatory action research. Such an approach aims to produce inclusive, context-specific insights capable of informing policy and practice that resonate with on-the-ground realities of those living within and alongside landscapes, fostering both ecological regeneration and social justice.
The genesis of LAND is itself emblematic of the project’s integrative ethos. Conceived during an inspiring hike in the Spanish Pyrenees, this intellectual collaboration unites four renowned social scientists who are leaders in their respective fields. Their combined expertise spans anthropology, political ecology, agrarian studies, development studies, climate research, and multispecies ethnography. This methodological pluralism facilitates the deployment of ethnographic fieldwork, livelihood analysis, action-oriented research, and systems modeling, enabling the project to capture the complexity of socio-ecological change across spatial and temporal scales.
The ERC Synergy evaluation panel lauded the team for its exceptional complementarity and demonstrated excellence. Their collective career trajectories and extensive networks within the proposed study areas position the researchers uniquely to undertake this ambitious endeavor. The panel emphasized their remarkable ability to integrate diverse disciplinary perspectives with deep empirical knowledge, highlighting the project’s potential to advance groundbreaking theories on landscape reform and rekindle global debates on sustainability and justice in the Anthropocene era.
Critically, the project’s approach underscores that transformative changes in landscapes require simultaneously addressing ecological sustainability and social equity. Recognizing that economic systems undergirding land use often promote exploitative and exclusionary practices, LAND interrogates how alternative models of profit and property can be mobilized or reconfigured to support pluralistic, democratic stewardship of landscapes. This inquiry aligns closely with ongoing global discourses regarding land rights, climate justice, indigenous sovereignty, and the rights of non-human species, marking LAND as a pivotal contribution to contemporary environmental scholarship and activism.
By concentrating on the relationships between land, livelihoods, and ecosystems, LAND navigates the complex terrain of adaptation amid climate change. The project acknowledges that landscapes are not static but are continually molded by socio-environmental feedback loops, necessitating dynamic, flexible governance strategies. Through interdisciplinary integration, the researchers aim to devise actionable frameworks that help anticipate and respond to vulnerabilities within local and regional landscapes, thereby contributing to more robust climate change adaptation policies that are sensitive to cultural and ecological specificities.
Ultimately, LAND aspires to stimulate new thinking that transcends disciplinary silos, advocating for systemic shifts in how societies conceptualize and engage with landscapes. The project’s emphasis on landscape reform navigates a pathway toward envisioning landscapes as sites of ongoing negotiation, where justice and sustainability are co-produced through collaborative, context-sensitive interventions. In doing so, LAND challenges entrenched paradigms and advocates for transformative action grounded in scientific rigor and normative commitment to planetary well-being.
This innovative research not only advances academic frontiers but also holds profound implications for policymakers, practitioners, and communities worldwide. By reimagining the very terms of land use and landscape transformation, the project invites a reconsideration of humanity’s place within the Earth’s biosphere. It offers a timely, integrative framework for confronting the multifaceted crises that define the Anthropocene, harnessing scientific insight toward crafting viable, equitable futures for both human and non-human life.
In the final analysis, the synergy among Borras, Corbera, Scoones, and Tsing encapsulates the momentum necessary for pioneering comprehensive solutions at the nexus of social justice, ecological sustainability, and economic viability. As LAND unfolds over the next half decade, its findings promise to illuminate pathways for living on a fragile planet in ways that are both life-affirming and just, potentially shaping global environmental scholarship and policy well beyond the initial project horizon.
Subject of Research:
The project investigates socio-ecological transformations through the lens of landscape reform in the Anthropocene, addressing global challenges by integrating ecological sustainability, social justice, and economic dynamics across diverse bioregions.
Article Title:
Land and Life in the Anthropocene: Pioneering Landscape Reform for a Just and Sustainable Future
Web References:
https://erc.europa.eu/apply-grant/synergy-grant
https://www.eur.nl/people/jun-borras
https://www.ids.ac.uk/people/ian-scoones/
https://www.icrea.cat/community/icreas/16866/esteve-corbera-elizalde/
https://anthropocene.au.dk/people-and-projects
Image Credits:
Credit: LAND project
Keywords:
Land management, Landscape evolution, Land use, Sustainability, Sustainable development, Climate change, Climate change adaptation, Ethnography, Justice, Anthropology
