The thirty landowners of Land Revive and Thrive are forming a cooperative: the vehicle through which restoration payments, harvest shares and carbon revenue will flow, and through which they hold a collective voice in the project.
This is the difference between consultation and standing. Thirty individual landowners negotiating separately with a developer have thirty separate positions and no way to hold one. A cooperative gives them a single counterparty, a membership that can vote, and a bank account that is theirs rather than ours. It also gives us someone to be accountable to who does not work for us.
Ownership is not a word we want to use decoratively. Here it is a legal structure, and it is being registered.