Super-rich landowners in social-ecological systems: Opportunities in affective political ecology and life course perspectives

The world’s wealthiest individuals own an increasingly large portion of the world’s rural agricultural land and through their ownership, assume unprecedented control over ecosystem processes and biodiversity. This critical review considers recent geographic scholarship and its implications for gaining traction in understanding high net worth (HNW) owners as critical components of complex social-ecological systems. Though scholars have begun to question the role of the super-rich in systems of environmental management, questions remain about how HNW individuals influence and shape rural communities and ecologies over time. This review identifies HNW landowners as key constituents of social-ecological system dynamics and examines how they change with the ecological and social systems in which they operate through feedbacks that are unique to the nature of ownership and management of extensive rural properties. To address literature gaps and motivate future work on HNW landownership and rural change, we offer a novel research framework and agenda that integrates affective political ecology and sociology’s life course perspective through a social-ecological systems approach.