Doctoral Dissertation Research: Land Trusts, Conservation Easements, and the Growth of Private Land Protection in the United States

Clark University, Worcester MA

Investigators

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation research project will focus on the ways that the governance, ownership, and financing of protected areas have changed within the United States since the late 1970s as well as the impact of those changes. Special emphasis will be placed on the growing use of legal agreements called conservation easements negotiated with private landowners on private property, often by non-profit conservation land trusts. The project will contribute new knowledge about the ways that conservation easements by land trust groups have altered the geographies and social outcomes of conservation efforts. It will provide new information about the geographic dimensions of such activity, and it will enhance basic understanding about evolving forms of environmental governance and changing forms of property rights. Because the doctoral student will work closely with a wide range of land trust organizations across the country as well as umbrella groups that help guide land trust policy making, project findings will have direct utility by groups and others actively using this new form of governance to protect environmental quality and private property rights. Because land trust-related conservation easements have been adopted in many other nations, project findings should contribute new insights regarding the recent emergence of large-scale privatized conservation around the globe as well as other novel forms of the commodification of nature. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career. Non-profit conservation land trusts now protect more than 47 million acres in the U.S., an area that is more than twice the combined acreage of all the national parks in the lower 48 states. This total increased by 10 million acres between 2005 and 2010. The core questions on which the project will focus are (1) how land trusts emerged as major actors in land conservation in the United States over the past three decades and (2) what were the consequences of land-trust activity for property relations, governance, and the financing of conservation. The doctoral student will employ a three-part qualitative methodology consisting of expert interviews; a national-scale survey of U.S.-based land trust groups; extended case studies in San Francisco, California; Denver, Colorado; and Grand Lake Stream, Maine. Among key issues to be examined through the case studies are increases in the frequency of legal challenges to the perpetuity of land trust lands that constitute new risks to this form of conservation; reliance on federal and state tax credits to incentivize conservation, which means that government agencies not charged with oversight of the environment or natural resources like the Internal Revenue Service have come to play a significant role in defining, governing, and regulating nature; and the increasing involvement of institutional investors and private equity firms in collaborations with land trusts, which has led to new approaches to the commodification of conservation landscapes and new metrics for measuring success.