Jaan Looga will defend his doctoral thesis “The Role of Small Peripheral Local Governments in Farm Innovation: Land Consolidation as a Spatial Planning Instrument in Estonia”

On 6 May at 15:00 Jaan Looga will defend his doctoral thesis “The Role of Small Peripheral Local Governments in Farm Innovation: Land Consolidation as a Spatial Planning Instrument in Estonia” for obtaining the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (in Economics)

Supervisors:
Professor Kadri Ukrainski, University of Tartu
Professor (em.) Dr. h.c. Peter Joachim Friedrich, University of Tartu

Opponents:
Professor Vida Malienė, Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom
Dr. Ants-Hannes Viira, The Estonian Chamber of Agriculture and Commerce, Estonia

Summary
Small peripheral local governments hold a hidden tool for farm innovation activity– and most aren't using it.

Imagine trying to run a factory where your machinery is split across a dozen different buildings scattered across town. You'd waste half your time just moving between them. Estonian farmers face a similar problem – their fields are often fragmented into dozens of small, scattered parcels, a legacy of the chaotic land restitution of the 1990s. And this spatial puzzle, it turns out, has a direct cost: farms with fragmented land are less productive, and less likely to invest in new technology.

That is the central discovery of Jaan Looga's doctoral thesis at the University of Tartu. Analysing hundreds of Estonian farms over several years, Looga found that improving a farm's land structure significantly increases the probability that a farmer will innovate for example buy new machinery, build new facilities. By that it is possible to adopt smarter agricultural practices.

This matters not just for farmers, but for small peripheral local governments – the rural municipalities that cover much of Estonia and similar post-Soviet countries. These municipalities lack universities or research centres. They cannot offer the traditional tools of innovation policy. But they do hold one lever: spatial planning authority. They can initiate land consolidation.

The thesis argues that consolidation is not just an agricultural tidying exercise. It is, in fact, a practical intervention available to municipalities. And the effects extend further: better-structured farms produce more, earn more, and ultimately generate more local tax revenue – funding better schools and roads.

The research also reveals a policy blind spot: Estonia has invested heavily in national R&D but allocated the least of all Central and Eastern European countries to building capacity. The tools exist. What's missing is the capacity to use EU funds to increase farm innovation activity.

The defence will be held in Narva Rd. 18–1018, Tartu and online

Thesis: https://hdl.handle.net/10062/120542