Investing in Landesque Capital: Spatial Suitability for Biocultural Restoration on Public Lands in Hawaiʻi

1. Introduction

Across the Hawaiian archipelago, Kānaka Maoli continue to cultivate loʻi, care for loko iʻa, and reopen field systems built by their kūpuna. Stone walls of dryland field systems stretch across leeward slopes, terrace complexes (loʻi) step down windward valleys, and the walls of fishponds (loko iʻa) encircle coastal bays. These are living systems as well as archaeological sites, and they are what Blaikie and Brookfield (1987, 9) call "landesque capital": "any investment in land with an anticipated life well beyond that of the present crop, or crop cycle."¹ Before 1778, these systems functioned as the primary infrastructure of society, underpinning a population estimated between 400,000 and 800,000 (Kirch 2007).

Today, however, the mechanisms for funding public infrastructure in Hawaiʻi have become decoupled from these landscape-based systems. The State of Hawaiʻi’s Capital Improvement Project (CIP) budget—funded primarily through General Obligation bonds—allocates billions of dollars annually for "gray" infrastructure such as highways, harbors, and public buildings. In contrast, the restoration of traditional agricultural systems, which provide comparable public benefits in terms of flood mitigation, aquifer recharge, and food security, is largely excluded from this capital funding stream. Instead, biocultural restoration projects are forced to rely on piecemeal, short-term funding sources like Grants-in-Aid (GIA), which prohibit the long-term planning and "heavy lifting" (e.g., wall restoration, dredging) required to revitalize these systems.

This paper addresses this policy gap by reframing biocultural restoration as a form of capital infrastructure investment. We argue that restoring a fishpond wall or an irrigation network on public land delivers public benefits comparable to repairing a state reservoir or sea wall, and should be eligible for the same long-term financing mechanisms.

To operationalize this concept, we conduct a spatial suitability analysis of state-owned lands to identify areas where biocultural restoration is most ecologically and socially viable. By intersecting government land ownership records with data on Indigenous agricultural potential (Kurashima et al. 2019) and State Land Use Districts, we identify a public land base where restoration is feasible. Furthermore, we examine the historical context of the "Land Hui" movement as a precedent for community-based management of these resources, suggesting that a return to neo-traditional tenure arrangements—where the state holds title but communities hold long-term stewardship rights, as Act 203 (2026) now allows on DLNR lands—offers a viable pathway for revitalizing Hawaiʻi’s landesque capital.

2. Context: A History of Investment, Dispossession, and Persistence

2.1 Building Landesque Capital

Over many generations before 1778, Kānaka Maoli invested heavily in agricultural infrastructure, which Allen (1991) describes as the "material engine" of governance under the aliʻi. This was not subsistence farming in a simple sense, but a system of "public works" built and maintained by communal labor, with aliʻi and konohiki directing labor and collecting surplus.

The development of this infrastructure followed distinct geological pathways (Kirch 1994). On the older, eroded islands of Kauaʻi and Oʻahu, investment focused on loʻi kalo (irrigated taro terraces), which utilized sophisticated hydraulic engineering to divert stream water into valley-wide complexes. These systems were highly effective: Palmer et al. (2009) found that irrigation water in these systems supplied nutrients (calcium) at rates 100 times higher than natural soil weathering, a fertility benefit built into the design of the system.

On the younger islands of Maui and Hawaiʻi, investment shifted to "farming the rock" through vast dryland field systems (such as the Kohala and Kona field systems), where field walls and mulching strategies modified microclimates to support sweet potato and ʻulu production (Kirch & Sahlins 1992; Vitousek et al. 2004). These investments were capital-intensive: they required immense upfront labor to construct but yielded increasing returns over generations, so that the labor of one generation continued to feed the next.²

Comparative work places Hawaiʻi within a wider Pacific pattern. In a phylogenetic study of 155 Austronesian-speaking societies, Sheehan et al. (2018) found that landesque capital intensive agriculture and sociopolitical hierarchy coevolved, though not deterministically: hierarchy promoted the adoption of landesque capital at least as much as landesque capital promoted hierarchy. Evidence that hierarchy kept these systems from being lost once built, however, was weak. Their suggested explanation is that maintaining a system takes less labor than building one, so pressure from elites matters most at the building stage. Hawaiian evidence points the same way. Earle's measurements of Hawaiian irrigation systems found that they ranged from family-farm size (about 0.5 ha) to village size and required no centralized management; the chiefly system of allocating land and water and collecting surplus "was politically imposed but was not necessary for operation of irrigation" (Brookfield 1984, summarizing Earle 1978, 1980). Landesque capital is a social achievement as much as an engineering one, and its everyday operation has long rested with families and communities.

2.2 Dispossession and Disruption (1820–1880)

The disruption of these systems was neither accidental nor purely environmental. It was driven by converging factors between 1820 and 1880:

1. Political and Religious Change (1819): The ʻAi Noa, led by aliʻi including Liholiho, Kaʻahumanu, and Keōpūolani, ended the kapu system and reshaped the religious basis of the labor obligations that konohiki (stewards of an ahupuaʻa, appointed by aliʻi, with obligations to the people and the ʻāina) organized for cleaning ʻauwai and repairing walls (Earle 1978).
2. Depopulation: Introduced epidemics killed a large share of Kānaka Maoli; estimates of the loss vary widely (Kirch 2007). Families and communities carried that grief while working to keep their ʻāina cultivated.
3. The Sandalwood Trade: Under pressure from debts to foreign merchants, aliʻi directed labor away from food production to cutting sandalwood for trade, contributing to famine (Rice 2020).
4. The Māhele (1848): The transition to fee-simple property fragmented the ahupuaʻa system. The traditional right of access to kula (uplands) and kai (sea) was severed from kuleana lands, the parcels awarded to makaʻāinana under the Kuleana Act of 1850, cutting many families off from resources the system depended on (Roversi 2012).

By 1880, plantation agriculture controlled most land and water, though Kānaka Maoli kept cultivating loʻi wherever they could hold land and water. The durability of the initial investment remained visible: rice farmers in the late 19th century, mostly Chinese immigrants, reused loʻi terraces that had been leased or sold as "successional capital" for export crops (Bayliss-Smith 1997). Industrial sugar then dewatered much of this system, building ditches that carried the stream water loʻi depend on out of their watersheds (MacLennan 2014). Clark and Tsai (2009, 2012) argue that landesque capital is best judged by its consequences: whether an investment durably improves the land's capability. By that test, the plantation ditches were long-lived investments in land, but not landesque capital, because they were built by drawing down the capability of the loʻi.

Bayliss-Smith (1997) describes this Pacific sequence as a succession of forms of capital: from taro garden (landesque capital) to market garden, to plantation (productive capital), to resort and golf course (finance capital), with each stage displacing both the landesque capital and the communities that built it. Clark and Tsai (2012) argue that the destruction, abandonment, or devaluation of landesque capital belongs on the balance sheet of ecologically unequal exchange, which is often driven by productive and finance capital entering places where landesque capital once prevailed. Hawaiʻi followed much of that sequence. The walls and terraces that remain on public land are what is left of that ledger.

2.3 The Response: The Land Hui Movement

In the wake of the Māhele, Native Hawaiians organized against dispossession. They used the Hawaiian Kingdom's new property law to maintain communal land tenure. Between the 1860s and 1920s, groups of Native Hawaiians formed land hui—cooperative associations that pooled resources to purchase entire ahupuaʻa (Roversi 2012; Watson 1932).

Hui kept land, water, and community together under hostile law. A hui would hold the land in common, often adopting a constitution and bylaws that mirrored traditional resource management: electing a luna (overseer) to oversee water rights, enforce grazing limits, and maintain shared infrastructure, while allocating individual plots for family use. This hybrid governance structure allowed communities to retain access to the full vertical resource zone (mountain to sea) despite the legal fragmentation of the surrounding landscape.

Although many hui were eventually dissolved by partition suits or hostile acquisition, they established a crucial precedent: that communal management of land, coupled with formal legal tenure, is a viable mechanism for stewardship.

2.4 Modern Landesque Capital Investment and the Funding Gap

Today, community organizations continue this lineage, restoring these same landscapes. Groups like Paepae o Heʻeia (Heʻeia, Oʻahu) and Waipā Foundation (Waipā, Kauaʻi) restore fishponds and loʻi, in these two cases on land owned by Kamehameha Schools. Many other community groups do this work on State and County land.

Groups working on public land face a barrier that hui members did not: they do not hold title. The State of Hawaiʻi is the legal landowner (often via the Department of Land and Natural Resources), yet it rarely invests capital funds in restoring the agricultural systems on these lands. Instead, community groups are left to patch together short-term grants for what is essentially public infrastructure maintenance.

This gap is not new. Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) observed that the private benefits of costly landesque investments are seldom enough to justify them at typical discount rates, and that such investments are rarely decided by individuals who bear all the costs and reap all the benefits. Historically, they were built out of necessity or through social and political relations that organized labor beyond the household, as the aliʻi and konohiki did in Hawaiʻi. Where returns span generations and benefits are shared, public capital is the fitting source of investment.

For example, rebuilding the roughly 7,000-foot kuapā (wall) at Heʻeia Fishpond involves moving tons of coral and basalt—a capital project in every engineering sense. Yet comparable work on State land is classified as "cultural practice" rather than "infrastructure improvement," so it largely falls outside the scope of the State’s primary capital financing mechanism, the General Obligation bond market.

3. Methodology

3.1 Study Area and Data Sources

This analysis covers the major Hawaiian Islands (Hawaiʻi, Maui, Oʻahu, Kauaʻi, Molokaʻi, Lānaʻi). The spatial framework operates on the NAD83(HARN) / UTM zone 4N projected coordinate system (EPSG:3750) to ensure accurate area calculations.

We integrated four primary datasets to identify suitable sites:

1. Government Land Ownership: Detailed parcel data from the Hawaii Statewide GIS Program, filtered to exclude federal lands and retain only State and County owned parcels. This defines the "public land" universe where state CIP funding is applicable.
2. State Land Use Districts (SLUD): Official district boundaries (Agriculture, Rural, Conservation, Urban) which define the regulatory envelope for each parcel.
3. Indigenous Agricultural Potential: The spatial model developed by Kurashima et al. (2019), which models the potential extent of traditional intensive agriculture.
4. Current Land Cover: The Hawaii Cropland Data Layer (HCDL) v2.0 (Li et al. 2024), a 10-meter resolution raster product developed through a collaboration between USDA NASS and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. This dataset leverages AlphaEarth Foundations geospatial embeddings to provide crop-specific classification, which we used to identify existing development or conflicts.

3.2 Indigenous Agricultural Modeling

To identify where traditional Hawaiian agricultural systems could function, we utilized the Kurashima et al. (2019) geospatial model. This model estimates where traditional Hawaiian agricultural systems can grow under current climate, for three systems:

• Loʻi Kalo (Wetland Taro): Modeled based on the presence of perennial streams, hydraulic soil types, low slope (< 10°), and elevation (< 415m).
• Dryland Field Systems: Modeled for areas with 750–1600mm annual rainfall, slope < 12°, and substrates of sufficient geological age (> 400kyr) to support soil fertility.
• Colluvial (Agroforestry): The "colluvial slope" system, defined by broader parameters (slope < 30°, rainfall > 750mm)—a rainfed, extensive cropping system on fertile lower valley slopes that tended toward an agroforestry structure, buffering the core agricultural zones.

Our analysis specifically targets the "High Potential" zones from this model, representing the optimal convergence of climatic and geomorphic conditions.

3.3 Suitability Analysis & Scoring

To identify public lands suited to restoration, we performed a spatial intersection of these layers using Python (Geopandas, Rasterstats). We utilized the NAD83(HARN) / UTM zone 4N projected coordinate system (EPSG:3750) for all geometric calculations to minimize distortion.

We developed a composite Suitability Score (0–100) to rank sites based on their viability for ahupuaʻa-scale restoration. The scoring algorithm weights three factors:

1. Indigenous Agricultural Potential (40%): Derived from the Kurashima model rank.
   • High = 100 points
   • Medium = 60 points
   • Low = 30 points
2. Land Use Compatibility (35%): Based on the regulatory ease of restoration.
   • Agricultural District = 100 points
   • Rural District = 75 points
   • Conservation District = 50 points (Restoration possible but regulatively burdensome).
   • Urban District = 25 points.
3. Parcel Size (25%): Favoring larger contiguous parcels that allow for system-scale restoration.
   • > 100 acres = 100 points
   • 25–100 acres = 75 points
   • 5–25 acres = 50 points
   • < 5 acres = Scaled linearly down to 0.

Exclusion Criteria: We utilized the HCDL v2.0 to filter for conflict. Using zonal statistics (rasterstats), we assigned each parcel a dominant land cover class. Parcels where the majority pixels were classified as "Commercial/Industrial" or "High Intensity Developed" were flagged for exclusion, ensuring that priority sites are not currently occupied by critical modern infrastructure.

4. Results

4.1 Distribution of Suitable Lands

The spatial analysis evaluated government-owned parcels across the main Hawaiian Islands (Figure 1). Of these, 2,819 parcels were identified as "Medium Suitability" or higher (Score ≥ 40). Together they contain about 49,750 acres of restorable land, within parcels totaling about 442,700 acres. Acreage below refers to restorable land, not whole parcels, unless noted.

Geographic Distribution:
Oʻahu leads in both parcel count and restorable acreage (about 19,400 acres), followed by Hawaiʻi Island (about 14,900) and Kauaʻi (about 8,600). Hawaiʻi Island and Kauaʻi have the largest whole parcels, but only part of each parcel is suitable. Note: Earlier versions of this analysis excluded Oʻahu under the mistaken belief that the public Kurashima et al. (2019) release omitted it; the full deposit in fact models seven of the eight main islands (all but Niʻihau), and Oʻahu is now fully included.

Island	Parcel Count	Suitable Acres	Mean Suitability Score	Primary Opportunity
Hawaiʻi	728	14,850	74.70	Dryland
Kauaʻi	477	8,646	70.71	Colluvial (agroforestry)
Oʻahu	1,177	19,406	64.95	Colluvial (agroforestry)
Maui	261	2,497	73.26	Dryland
Molokaʻi	175	4,350	72.83	Colluvial (agroforestry)
Lānaʻi	1	<1	46.18	Colluvial (agroforestry)

System Type Analysis:
Breaking down the restorable Kurashima footprint on public land by traditional system, Colluvial (agroforestry) potential is the largest by area (approx. 25,600 acres), followed by Dryland Field Systems (approx. 17,200 acres) and Loʻi Kalo (approx. 6,700 acres). Dryland dominates on Hawaiʻi and Maui, while colluvial agroforestry dominates on Oʻahu, Kauaʻi, and Molokaʻi. Loʻi Kalo potential, while smallest in absolute acreage, is culturally central and concentrated on specific hydrological features—notably the windward Oʻahu and Kauaʻi valleys. (Footprint acres reflect land that is both modelled as agriculturally suitable and currently restorable—i.e., not built-up or open water.)

Land Use District Analysis:
The intersection with State Land Use Districts (SLUD) reveals a distinct bifurcation in restoration opportunities:

• Agricultural District: Holds 1,260 of the priority sites (approx. 22,200 suitable acres, in parcels totaling 148,300 acres) at the highest mean suitability score (81.4). These lands are the lowest-conflict opportunities for restoration—areas where both the ecological potential and the regulatory framework align.
• Conservation District: Holds 581 priority sites and the largest suitable acreage (approx. 23,800 acres, in parcels totaling 283,400 acres) at a still-high mean score (64.9). Critically, many of Hawaiʻi’s most intact historical systems (e.g., upper valley loʻi and forest zones) are located here.
• Urban District: Holds 857 priority sites but only about 3,700 suitable acres—small, fragmented parcels (largely on Oʻahu) atop former loʻi and colluvial lands, where restoration competes directly with development.

4.2 Ownership Patterns

State of Hawaiʻi agencies are the primary landowners of suitable sites, holding about 32,800 of the roughly 49,750 suitable acres.

• State (Other/DLNR): Holds the largest acreage (approx. 32,800 suitable acres across 1,512 priority parcels), including massive forest reserves on Hawaiʻi and Kauaʻi suitable for colluvial agroforestry.
• Department of Hawaiian Home Lands (DHHL): DHHL holds 663 priority parcels (approx. 9,700 suitable acres). A fragmented land base that may benefit from the hui model of aggregated management.
• Department of Agriculture (DOA): Holds just 39 priority parcels (approx. 1,800 suitable acres) in large, consolidated tracts well-aligned with agricultural restoration.
• County Lands: County governments collectively hold 605 priority parcels (approx. 5,400 suitable acres), often in closer proximity to population centers.

Top Suitability Sites:
The analysis identified 94 parcels with a score of 100. The largest by area are a 16,462-acre DHHL parcel on Maui and a 14,559-acre DHHL parcel and 13,123-acre Department of Agriculture parcel on Kauaʻi, though each contains only about 80–600 suitable acres. The parcel with the most suitable land is a 10,457-acre DHHL parcel on Hawaiʻi Island (about 1,900 suitable acres). These sites represent immediate opportunities for pilot "Landesque Capital" investment projects.

5. Discussion

5.1 Reframing Infrastructure: A Public Land Base for Restoration

The results show that about 49,800 acres of public land, within 3,132 parcels, overlap with Indigenous agricultural potential and remain restorable. Currently, these lands are viewed primarily as conservation assets (passive management) or agricultural leases (commercial management).

We propose a Tiered Restoration Strategy based on current land cover, which dictates the level of capital investment required:

• Tier 1: Immediate Opportunity (Fallow/Shrubland): Approximately 7% of the suitable land base (approx. 3,400 acres) is currently classified as fallow. These lands have minimal conflicting uses and require the lowest barrier to entry—primarily invasive species removal and infrastructure repair. These are the lowest-conflict candidates for pilot CIP projects.
• Tier 2: Negotiated Restoration (Pasture): A significant portion (20%, approx. 9,900 acres) is currently used for grazing. Restoring these lands requires a "negotiated" approach, potentially integrating silvopasture models where native trees and dryland crops coexist with managed grazing, rather than displacing current lessees.
• Tier 3: Heavy Lifting (Forest): The majority (71%, approx. 35,000 acres) is currently forested, often with invasive species. Restoring these systems represents a massive capital undertaking—clearing, terracing, and replanting—that fits the definition of "heavy infrastructure" work suited for long-term bond financing.

By reframing these landscapes as public infrastructure, the State could justify the use of CIP bonds to restore them. For example, the Tier 1 parcels represent sites where capital investment in wall repair and irrigation reconstruction would yield direct returns in aquifer recharge and flood mitigation—services that otherwise require expensive gray infrastructure.

5.2 The Conservation Paradox

A critical finding is how much high-potential land lies within the Conservation District: about 23,800 suitable acres, the largest share of any district. While intended to protect resources, the strict regulations of the Conservation District often hinder the restoration of the very biocultural systems that created those resources.

Restoring a loʻi in a Conservation District requires a Conservation District Use Permit (CDUP), a costly and bureaucratic process that treats traditional stewardship akin to development. Our analysis suggests that a significant portion of the state's "landesque capital" remains uncultivated not because of ecological unsuitability, but because the regulatory framework focuses on preservation (static) rather than restoration (active).

5.3 Tenure and Governance: Act 203 and Future Research

While this analysis identifies where restoration should happen, it leaves open the question of how tenure should be structured. The "Land Hui" history suggests that long-term community stewardship is essential for maintaining these systems.

In 2026 the Legislature passed HB 2218, enacted as Act 203 (2026) and signed July 8, 2026. It authorizes the Board of Land and Natural Resources to enter community co-management agreements of up to 65 years with community-based nonprofit organizations, for purposes including Native Hawaiian subsistence, cultural, and religious practices and the restoration of native species and habitats. Its findings ground the law in mālama ʻāina and ahupuaʻa-based management. The law was initiated by Hui Makaʻāinana o Makana, which has cared for Hāʻena State Park on Kauaʻi since 1998, and drafted with Kuaʻāina Ulu ʻAuamo (KUA), DLNR, and other partners. Its authors describe it as formalizing community co-management that already exists, alongside earlier tools such as Community-Based Subsistence Fishing Areas, curatorships, and revocable permits (Hawaiʻi Conservation Alliance et al. 2026).

Act 203 supplies the social and organizational infrastructure for community access to public land, but it appropriates no funds: each co-management plan must identify its own "methods of funding." Short-term permits have also limited co-managers' ability to make long-term investments; at Hāʻena these include dune restoration to protect iwi kūpuna and replacing a failing septic system near Keʻe lagoon (KUA n.d.). Brookfield (1984) identified this as inherent to landesque capital: it "creates an investment in land which the improver must be able to hold." Long-term agreements address the holding, and the family- and village-scale design of Hawaiian irrigation makes community organizations the right scale to hold it. CIP can fill the remaining gap, the investment itself. Co-management provides the governance and access; capital funding pays for the walls, ʻauwai, and loʻi. Two limits matter for this analysis. First, Act 203 applies only to land under DLNR's jurisdiction. That likely covers much of the roughly 32,000 suitable acres held by the State, though parcel records do not show which agency manages each parcel, and it does not cover DHHL, Department of Agriculture, or county land. Second, its permitted purposes do not name agriculture or food production directly, so how loʻi and field-system cultivation fit within subsistence and cultural practice will be settled through co-management plans and rules.

Future research should explore:

1. Pairing Co-Management and CIP: Which suitable parcels fall under DLNR jurisdiction, and how could Act 203 agreements and CIP appropriations be paired for the same sites? For land outside DLNR, which instruments (e.g., long-term stewardship leases, community-based subsistence fishing areas) could carry forward what hui achieved?
2. Community and Native Hawaiian Governance: How could community and Native Hawaiian governance hold long-term stewardship of these lands, and how does that relate to broader Kānaka Maoli land and sovereignty efforts (ea)?

6. Conclusion

Biocultural restoration is cultural practice, and it is also a capital improvement strategy for a changing climate. That rationale is old. Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) describe landesque capital as land management "designed to secure future production." In Hawaiʻi, droughts severe enough to cause famine recurred on average every 21 years (Schmitt 1970), and low-lying fields faced flood and tsunami; Brookfield (1984) suggests that inland expansion of irrigation may partly reflect family- and village-level strategies for reducing that risk. This analysis shows that the State of Hawaiʻi holds, in trust, a large land base where landesque capital awaits water, access, and support—infrastructure that, if restored, could provide food security and climate resilience for generations.

By recognizing these systems, built by kūpuna and maintained by their descendants, as public infrastructure and aligning capital funding (CIP) with their restoration, Hawaiʻi can move beyond a model of passive conservation to one of active, abundance-generating stewardship. With Act 203 now providing a path for community co-management of DLNR lands, capital funding is the missing piece. The people and the ʻāina are ready; the policy needs to catch up.

Data Availability Statement

The code used for the spatial analysis, including scoring algorithms and data processing scripts, is available in the GitHub repository at https://github.com/ainacip/ainacip. The processed datasets, including the "Ideal Sites" shapefiles and prioritization results, are archived within the repository's data/processed/ directory. Raw data sources (State GIS, HCDL) are publicly available from their respective agencies.

Notes

1. Sen (1959) coined the term with a narrower meaning: capital goods that substitute for land, such as fertilizer, which he assumed "wear away in one year" (Sen 1959, 280). Brookfield (1972) described permanent improvements to land as "capital" without using Sen's term; by 1984 he called them "landesque" capital, and Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) gave the definition now in common use (Clark & Tsai 2009). ↩
2. Kirch (2007) distinguishes the two pathways: irrigated loʻi and loko iʻa represent landesque capital intensification, while the dryland field systems represent cropping cycle intensification, in which fallow periods shortened and plots were formalized with stone walls. The dryland systems left permanent walls on the land, but they required far more labor to maintain and gave lower, riskier yields. We use landesque capital in Brookfield's broader sense, which includes field systems as a whole (Brookfield 2001, as cited in Clark & Tsai 2009), but the point that maintenance costs less than construction applies most directly to loʻi and loko iʻa. ↩

7. References