PropTech goes wild: Hunting access platforms and the neo liberalization of rural land relations

Scholars are increasingly interested in the role digital technologies play in shaping access to, the management of, and relationships to the environment. This paper contributes to these discussions by examining hunting access platforms, a suite of online marketplaces that facilitate the sale of hunting access on private lands in the US. We identify hunting access platforms as a distinctly environmental form of property technology, or PropTech, that takes access to wildlife and their habitats as their central commodity. Our paper presents an exploratory mapping of this emergent industry, analyzing the digital tools and discourses surrounding hunting access platforms. In doing so, we illustrate how digital platforms extend into rural geographies, offering new digital mechanism of accessing nature. We argue that in the US, where hunting is managed by states as a form of conservation, these platforms enhance the control of private interests over public resources, create new forms of exclusion for landless hunters, and thereby contribute to the neoliberalization of rural land relations in the US. We propose that hunting access platforms demonstrate how PropTech's emergence into rural geographies merits further attention for its potential to reshape society's relationships to land and the environment and the ways that access to nature is enabled and imagined.