Resort capitalism or smallholder tourism? How the land distribution still shapes the politics of place in advanced economies
Principal Investigator: Dr Kira Gartzou-Katsouyanni
Co-Investigator: Dr Lamprini Rori
Our project aims to advance understanding about how the distribution of land influences the political economy of place in advanced democracies where agriculture is no longer the key sector of the economy.
The literature has traditionally associated land conflict with agriculture and has assumed that as the importance of agriculture declined in the Global North, the salience of the land distribution declined with it. However, many other sectors use land intensively, including several important drivers of economic growth in Europe: from tourism to renewable energy production and carbon-offset investments in rural areas, and from data centres and wholesale distribution facilities in post-industrial places to retail and office space in urban centres. We put forward the hypothesis that the degree to which land ownership is concentrated or fragmented will shape the local organisation of those sectors, giving rise to different distributions of land rents and economic opportunities for the local population, and shaping their preferences along both the left-right and pro-/ anti-establishment dimensions of politics.
We investigate this hypothesis based on the case of tourism, a dynamic sector that has contributed substantially to Southern Europe’s recovery since the Eurozone crisis, but whose social and environmental sustainability is increasingly contested as its economic importance grows in Europe and globally. Focusing on variation in the land distribution allows us to nuance this discussion by studying the local dynamics unleashed by distinct tourism models associated with different degrees of historically inherited landholding concentration.
Our empirical setting is Greece, where the tourism industry typically consists of a multitude of small businesses, reflecting the high degree of land fragmentation that has characterised Greek agriculture since Ottoman times and that was reinforced through a series of far-reaching land reforms from the 1870s to the 1930s. On the other hand, in some areas such as northern Crete, Halkidiki, and the southwestern and northeastern Peloponnese, resort tourism has developed in areas where land remained concentrated in large plots either because it belonged to the state or the church, or because it was forest land where building permits were exceptionally issued for the construction of a resort. The Greek case allows us to comparatively study both tourism models.
We link the land distribution, smallholder- and resort-based tourism models, and local political preferences through quantitative analysis using a set of rich, original data sources. Those include geospatial plot-level data from the Hellenic Cadastre, microdata on occupational structure from the National Social Security Fund (EFKA), an original survey on individuals’ political preferences that we will conduct within coastal areas in Greece, as well as electoral results at the level of municipal units.
The core output of this project will be an academic journal article with the same title as our project. We will also contribute to topical debates about land-related policies in Greece, and particularly to discussions about spatial planning in touristic areas and the policy framework surrounding strategic investments.
Research Team
Principal investigator: Dr Kira Gartzou-Katsouyanni, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR), University of Oxford; Research Associate, HOC
Co-Investigator: Dr Lamprini Rori, Associate Professor in Political Analysis, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens