Public policy and contested political concepts: the ideological morphology of land value capture

Land value capture refers to policy tools designed to redistribute increases in land value resulting from development decisions. The rationale behind these policies is often rooted in the belief that it is either fundamentally unfair or economically inefficient for private landowners to retain all the benefits from land value increases. Land value capture policy debates can therefore invoke old ideological questions concerning the proper distribution and ownership of land and land value (and, therefore, property wealth and political power). This paper adapts Michael Freeden’s morphological approach for the analysis of ideologies and applies it to land value capture in England to examine the contestable and ideological qualities of this policy area. The paper explores how contested concepts are articulated from various ideological positions to legitimize and delegitimize policy interventions. Such concepts include land value, community, property, democracy, liberty, the market, the landowner and the role of the state. The paper argues that, by virtue of the dynamic articulations of these concepts, land value capture is a policy area in which the land question is still active and has the potential to erupt again.