CAP, land concentration and the politics of the green transition

What does land have to do with a just green transition? The answer is simple: everything.

We have completed a comparative study on the impacts of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) on land use and life in rural areas in Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia. The study was developed within the GreenPaths project alongside 14 other case studies and examines how green transition policies reshape land relations in post-socialist contexts. Our research confirms a crucial insight: land is not just a technical variable in sustainability debates. It is a political issue, a question of access, ownership concentration, and decision-making power.

Read the full case study here.

Land is power

Land is simultaneously a material resource, a social institution, and a political terrain. It anchors food systems, ecological cycles, livelihoods, identities, and cultural memory. Yet within dominant sustainability debates, particularly within EU climate and agricultural policy, land is often reduced to a technical variable: a commodity for carbon sequestration, renewable infrastructures, or biodiversity offsets. 

This case study challenges such technical framings. Drawing on political ecology, critical agrarian studies, and degrowth research, we show that land is where the core contradictions of Europe’s green transition become visible. Who controls land? Who benefits from subsidies? Who is excluded? These are not side questions – they are central to whether the transition is just.

What we found

Across Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia, the patterns are striking:

• Land concentration is accelerating. In Slovenia, more than half of farms cultivate less than 2 hectares, while a small minority controls a disproportionate share of land. In Serbia, less than 1% of landholders manage over 30% of arable land.
• Area-based CAP subsidies structurally reward size. Larger landholders receive the largest share of public funds, reinforcing concentration dynamics.
• Smallholders and young farmers are systematically disadvantaged.
• Post-socialist land restitution and privatisation processes amplify inequality, creating fertile ground for speculative land markets.
• Green measures can deepen inequality. Environmental conditionalities and eco-schemes, without redistribution, risk becoming another layer of exclusion.
• Environmental gains remain limited, while social costs are significant – including rural decline, depeasantisation and loss of local sovereignty.

Why the Balkans matter

Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia reveal structural tensions that are often less visible in Western Europe. Post-socialist property transformations, EU accession pressures and foreign investment regimes intersect with CAP instruments in ways that intensify land concentration and rural inequality. These contexts expose the justice blind spots of EU green policies. If the green transition does not address ownership, access and control over land, it risks reproducing old hierarchies under a new environmental vocabulary.

A missing dimension in green debates

Land is the missing dimension in many green transition discussions. Without addressing ownership, access and control, the “green” transition will not be just and risks reproducing old patterns of exclusion.

A just transition must therefore confront land politics directly. Because who owns the land ultimately shapes who owns the future.