Projects - Ongoing

Project Title - The role of the state, spatial policy systems and the governance of Landed Commons in Europe

Keywords - governance, role of the state, spatial policy systems

Several scholars have been for long underlining the growing potential that Landed Commons (LCs) embody, as alternative land governance arrangements covering a broad range between public and private property regimes, to address discrepancies between increasing land demands and sustainable development. However, global and European organizations have drawn attention to their often-limited legal recognition and institutional embeddedness in spatial policy domains. 

The DOMINIA project develops an interdisciplinary approach, in order to examine the role of the state as a distinct and complex spatial policy system that mediates the interactions between LCs and broader socio-political dynamics. To this end, we stir up a ‘dialogue’ between nation-wide policies and local community experiences to shed light on legal-institutional parameters that facilitate the development of hybrid property regimes and collective land governance schemes in seven (7) EU member states: Belgium (Flanders), France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Spain, and Greece.

In this context, DOMINIA innovatively approaches Land Policy as an interdisciplinary academic field, apt to underpin the amalgamation of the political economy of land, law and socio-spatial science/geography into an integrated theoretical and methodological framework to study commons and overcome their rather partial understanding in extant mono- or cross- disciplinary discourses.