Broadly understood as the governmentally-sanctioned acquisition of property from private landowners in the interest of development for public use or benefit, the legal and economic phenomenon of eminent domain raises salient questions regarding the genealogies of terms such as “public,” “private,” “development,” “use,” and “benefit.”

As a constitutionally protected concept, eminent domain, acquisition, or expropriation – depending on the country in which citizens find themselves – intimates through its application that land is primarily subject to the articulations of state authority. This intimation perpetuates the notion that citizens entrust their governments with the right to arbitrate the definitional existence and developmental fate of land and its inhabitants, human or otherwise. In its current applied iterations, however, eminent domain often functions as a node of speculative capitalist expansion allied with governmental administration, achieving its ends through the dual mechanism of “productivity and plunder.”1

Public use is not necessarily a misguided proposition. Eminent domain is conceivably aspirational insofar as private ownership is devalued to the point of site-specific dissolution in favor of a collective land use practice such as the construction of public schools and roads. There are also disputed instances in which beneficiaries are deeply entangled. These cases manifest with projects such as high-speed rail lines, where the retention of a farmer’s land is in contest with the overwhelming ecological benefit of reducing car emissions, or with national park designations that protect biodiversity and provide public access to wilderness yet fail to acknowledge or account for the Indigenous claims to sovereignty and land-based lifeways that are destroyed through this iteration of colonial appropriation.

Furthermore, when practiced in and through the prism of late capitalist ventures, the application of eminent domain turns toward the clearly insidious. Overwhelmingly, eminent domain projects displace the most exploited and immiserated populations within a given area, stretching the term “public” to mean specifically classed populations most closely linked to private ruling interests. 

A definitive example of land seizures that fall under eminent domain frameworks is that of fossil fuel companies and their construction of oil rigs, drilling platforms, and most notably, pipelines. In the US – a leading global exporter of crude and refined oil, and specifically in the state of Texas, the American fossil fuel industry’s capital – oil and gas companies frequently invoke eminent domain to appropriate private property for public use, thus requiring proof that transportation of oil goes “to or for the public for hire.”2 Public use in this case is reduced solely to private profitability, disregarding the resultant health and ecological crises created for the public. In 2022, individual issuances of property permits to drill for oil and gas increased by roughly 2,300 from 2021, with further exponential increases projected for the 2023 annual report.3 This number reflects the international demand for crude and refined oil due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine by direct means of the intensive accelerated application of eminent domain utilisation.

The contradictory nature of eminent domain applications and outcomes lies in a legal failure to acknowledge the structural inequities imbricated in the construction of a single definition of public “benefit.” This contradiction creates the conditions for both detriment and welfare to concurrently exist within the population, often relegating the vulnerable majority to the periphery of an imagined yet unachieved vision of societal prosperity.

  1. Richard Walker and Jason W. Moore, “Value, Nature, and the Vortex of Accumulation,” in Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities, eds. Erik Swyngedouw & Henrik Ernston (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2019), 61.
  2.  J. Zachary Williams, “Farmer’s Fight: Texas Eminent Domain and the 2015 Texas Rice II Case,” Energy Law Journal 37 (November 2016), 447. Citing section 111.002(6), Texas Natural Resource Code, https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/NR/htm/NR.111.htm
  3. Railroad Commission of Texas, “Summary of Drilling Permit, Completions and Plugging Reports Processed,” versions 2021, 2022, and 2023 (January–August). https://www.rrc.texas.gov/oil-and-gas/research-and-statistics/drilling-information/monthly-drilling-completion-and-plugging-summaries/