Reframing Absentee Landowners Through Measures of Involvement

Ownership and management of rural land in the American West has become increasingly diverse prompting a need to better understand how changing demographics and values relate to individual land management decisions and overall... [ view full abstract ]

Ownership and management of rural land in the American West has become increasingly diverse prompting a need to better understand how changing demographics and values relate to individual land management decisions and overall land cover. Absentee landowners, who reside away from their rural property, are a growing segment of this changing social landscape. The implications of absentee ownership on land management for wildlife conservation are not clearly understood perhaps because the absentee concept is fraught with ambiguous definitions and inconsistent measurement. The purpose of this research is to introduce the construct of “involvement with one’s land” to clarify and reframe the absentee landowner concept.  We examine land ownership and management decisions to maintain grasslands, where afforestation threatens grassland obligate wildlife.     

Based on a mail survey, we analyzed data from 236 rural rangeland owners in central Texas to explore the relationship between absentee land ownership and the current or past use of brush management to restore grasslands.  We used Akaike's information criterion (AIC) to compare candidate models from indicators of absenteeism including part-time residence, distance of permanent residence from land, and days spent visiting land.  We also included involvement with one’s land, as measured by hours per week operating or working on one’s land. Additionally, we employed path analysis to examine the relationship between absenteeism and brush management as a function of involvement.       

We found that involvement in land management was the best predictor of brush management behavior.  Absenteeism as traditionally measured through presence or absence and the additional variable of distance from land had no direct relationship with brush management unless mediated by the involvement construct.

Segmenting landowners based solely on the location of one’s full-time residence provides little information on brush management behavior.  This measure neglects the relationship that landowners, regardless of residency, may have with their land.  Although limited, our measure of involvement better characterizes the landowner-land relationship and thus is a better determinant of management behavior.  Future research that incorporates measures of involvement with the traditional absentee landowner concept may increase understanding of the changing dynamics of wildlife conservation on private lands.