Rethinking Polanyi's double movement through participatory justice: Land use planning in Puerto Rico

Abstract

Puerto Rico has lost an alarming amount of farmland in the past century, and land distribution is highly unequal in line with broader social patterns. These problems raise the question of alternative models that can enhance socio-ecological justice, and whether the reversal of the historical neglect of agriculture could factor significantly into such alternatives. A significant step toward such a reversal was arguably Puerto Rico's 2015 Plan de Uso de Terrenos (Land Use Plan) (PUT), the first island-level land use plan. I analyze the PUT as a Polanyian double movement to protect agricultural land from circulating as an urban asset, with the novel addition of environmental justice's “trivalent” notion of social justice. I argue that participatory justice, in particular, played a dual role in this “double movement”: first, the process achieved sufficient balance amongst actors to protect significant agricultural area from urban development; and second, the constituency mobilized through the PUT's creation later proved essential to the plan's defence against land marketization efforts. My analysis offers a unique synthesis of environmental justice and heterodox political economy and concludes that deepening dialogue across the two literatures can offer important insights for achieving emancipatory socio-ecological change in land use planning.

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