Stewardship Economy 6: Property rights

Book excerpt: Julian Pratt (1948 -2018) worked as a doctor in rural South Africa in 1975 and observed the factors contributing to the pattern of disease. He realised how the grossly unequal distribution of land for agriculture was having a devastating impact on people’s health and nutrition, the consequences of poverty and the need for migrant labour. As a result, he became passionate about land reform and pursued this interest for the next 40 years. He researched, proposed and campaigned for a radical approach to the market economy, one which would replace private ownership of land with a system he described as stewardship. Following his time in Africa, Julian became a GP in Sheffield. Increasingly interested in systems of care, in 1993 he moved to the King’s Fund in London, a health policy think tank. He wrote a book which reflected on the emerging model of general practice, Practitioners and Practices: A Conflict of Values? (1995). And with colleagues there he developed a “whole systems” approach to improving healthcare which drew on complexity theory and viewed organisations as living systems - described in Working Whole Systems: Putting Theory into Practice in Organisations (1999). In 2011 he published Stewardship Economy, private property without private ownership. The book sets out his vision for stewardship, a new type of property right for land and other natural resources. Under stewardship, those using land, ‘stewards’, have exclusive rights to use the land and, in return, they pay a stewardship fee (land value tax). These fees would, in time, replace other taxes to fund public services and a universal basic income. From 2011 -18 he researched the detailed work that formed the subsequent books, published in 2021.