A distributed process control equipment ownership arbitration system and method for arbitrating equipment ownership conflicts are disclosed. Individual control modules representing various process control entities within a process control system define a plurality of lists or queues for storing equipment arbitration information. Requests by one process control entity to acquire ownership over another process control entity are represented by an arbitration token that represents the ownership relationship sought by the acquiring process control entity. Copies of the arbitration token are communicated between the respective control modules and stored in the various arbitration queues defined by the control modules, depending on the status of the acquisition request. Upon receiving an acquisition request from another process control entity, the control module associated with the targeted process control entity decides whether the targeted process control entity is available to be acquired by the requesting control entity based on arbitration rules that are embedded within the control module itself. Once the targeted process control entity has been acquired by another process control entity it may not be acquired by any other process control entity until it has been released by the acquiring process control entity.