From Neutrality to Legitimacy: Rethinking Land, Rents, and Governance in Resource-Rich Societies
Land has long occupied a contested place in political economy. Classical thinkers such as Ricardo, Malthus, Mill, and George emphasized its scarcity, immobility, and capacity to generate unearned rents. Neoclassical theory, however, collapsed land into capital, erasing its distinctiveness and introducing the illusion of neutrality. This article challenges that illusion by distinguishing between commodification—the transformation of land into tradable property—and commoditization—the standardization of goods into fungible units. Land can undergo the first but never the second. Its ecological burdens, cultural attachments, and political claims resist substitution, ensuring that one land is never equivalent to another.
To demonstrate this argument, the paper develops a typology of non-neutrality (cultural/identity, spatial/ecological, political, legal/institutional, and economic) integrated with the MASI framework (Mobility, Access to Voice, Spatial Burden, Institutions). Comparative case studies—Nigeria’s Niger Delta and the Petroleum Industry Act 2021, Indigenous sovereignty struggles in Canada, and Norway’s North Sea oil governance—illustrate how commodification without commoditization generates distributive inequality, political alienation, and conflict.
The policy implications are direct: governance regimes that assume neutrality, treating land-based rents as fungible fiscal flows, systematically fail. By contrast, institutions that acknowledge land’s non-neutrality—through enforceable consent rights, territorial burden-sharing, liability funds, and transparent participatory mechanisms—can build legitimacy and stability.
The article thus restores land as a distinct factor of political economy and reframes resource governance around a simple but critical insight: commodification is possible, but commoditization is not.