To protect land governance and tenure gains, legal and technical instruments are not enough. Sustained political will is what determines whether these gains are advanced or reversed.
The driving force behind land reform is, at its core, political. Despite the resources poured into it, those who build these reforms must have the will to implement and grow them, even when doing so works against their own interests. Kenneth H. Parsons called land tenure problems “power problems.” Problems of disparity in economic, social and political power.
Additionally, land reform sits at the foundation of the SDGs. Secure and equitable access to land underpins how people escape poverty, feed themselves, and build resilient livelihoods. It directly advances SDG 1 (No Poverty), SDG 2 (Zero Hunger), and SDG 5 (Gender Equality), while also shaping SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions), since who controls land shapes who governs it. Land reform therefore functions less as a single-sector policy than as the foundation the rest of the development agenda is built on.
Land reform doesn’t happen quickly or cheaply. It is the product of years of legal drafting, community consultation, donor financing, and institutional capacity-building, often spanning decades before a single title is issued or acre recognised. That investment is valuable, but not durable on its own. A law can be passed, a resolution signed, a court battle won, yet none of this guarantees survival past the next change in political leadership or budget cycle. Without safeguards, these gains remain provisional rather than settled. This is how reforms are undone. Through the quiet erosion of the structures meant to hold them in place.
The cases that follow show what this looks like in practice.
Brazil
Brazil has tackled its land problem through agrarian reform aimed at redistributing land for rural livelihoods and environmental management. Efforts built through decades of both government-led and donor-funded work. Programs such as the World Bank’s Cédula da Terra program (World Bank ($68.5 million); from the federal government ($45 million); from the state governments ($1.9 million) among them, more recently joined by a WRI Brasil–Imazon–MST partnership funded through Norway’s climate finance initiative. But the history of the Carajás region shows that a legal pathway to land reform does not remove the political contest over land. Carajás became one of Brazil’s most visible sites of land conflict, culminating in the 1996 Eldorado dos Carajás massacre, where 21 landless workers were killed by police demanding agrarian reform.
That same contest is playing out again, more quietly, in the Tucumã settlement in Carajás. The community there holds valid titles, won through years of land reform. But copper prices rose, and mining applications began piling in. The community sits on one of the world’s largest mineral deposits, including copper, a mineral essential to the global clean energy transition. On paper, this is exactly what land administration is supposed to resolve: titles exist, rights are documented, and there’s a formal basis for recognizing who holds what. But documentation alone doesn’t settle a political and economic contest over increasingly valuable land. Titling, registration, and land-use planning matter, but they operate inside political systems. When the economic value of land changes, so does the pressure on those systems.
Colombia
The 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC placed Comprehensive Rural Reform at its center, aiming to improve access to land and rural services in conflict-affected areas. This built on existing mechanisms like the 2011 Victims and Land Restitution Law and the National Land Fund. The scale of international support reflects what implementation requires. In June 2017, Colombia’s Rural Development Agency and FAO signed a US$8.7 million agreement to support rural development and rebuild conflict-affected communities. Yet implementation has unfolded unevenly across administrations with different political priorities. Former President Juan Manuel Santos, who negotiated the agreement, has since called on his successor to fully implement it, noting it has already faltered under shifting political will.
On August 4, 2026, three days before leaving office, President Gustavo Petro signed a resolution closing nearly half of Colombia’s territory to new mining and oil contracts across the Amazon basin. Three days later, he was succeeded by Abelardo de la Espriella, who had campaigned on expanding oil drilling and mining. A reform signed at the very last moment of a presidency, met almost immediately by a successor elected on the opposite promise, is as clean a test of political durability as this article can offer.
Kenya
Kenya’s experience with the Ogiek community shows the clearest gap between winning a legal victory and achieving durable reform. In 2017, the Ogiek won at the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which found the government had violated seven of their rights by evicting them from the Mau Forest. In 2022, the court ordered land demarcation, titling, and compensation. By December 2025, Kenya had implemented nothing. Not the demarcation, not the compensation fund, not even formal recognition of the Ogiek as an Indigenous people. That legal victory took over a decade of litigation, supported by Minority Rights Group International, the Ogiek Peoples’ Development Programme, the Centre for Minority Rights Development, and the Forest Peoples Programme.
In the years the case sat waiting for compliance, some of the disputed land was quietly subdivided and titled to people outside the community, while the eviction the court had ruled illegal continued anyway, at a smaller scale, under cover of a process still technically “ongoing.” Nobody voted for this. No minister signed an order reversing the judgment. The government’s own defence, when pressed, was procedural. “There’s missing reports.” We request for more time.” And the task forces created, produced meetings but not titles. “We are living in absolute fear,” OPDP’s Daniel Kobei told reporters as one eviction wave began. A sentence that captures what a decade of legal victory has failed to change on the ground.
What these cases reveal
Brazil, Colombia and Kenya are different cases, but they share a common thread: reform in each required political decision-making, legal intervention, institutional capacity, and sustained financing to operate together. Brazil shows that even after land is redistributed, continued investment is needed to convert that redistribution into durable livelihoods once the underlying land becomes valuable again. Colombia shows that a peace agreement can create a legal framework but still depend on successive governments choosing to honor it. Finally, Kenya shows that even a binding court judgment can sit unimplemented indefinitely when the executive simply decides to do nothing.
Politics is not only a threat to these reforms but key to their protection. In 2019, Brazil’s own Congress partially reversed a presidential effort to strip land-demarcation authority from the country’s indigenous affairs agency, restoring it by legislative act. That reversal-of-a-reversal is a reminder that reforms resting on more than one branch or level of government are harder to unmake than those resting on a single office’s goodwill. Political durability isn’t the absence of political risk, but a structure built to withstand incoming changes.
Making the case
Land reform’s real test isn’t the day a law is passed, a title is issued, or what a court rules but every year afterward. When the officials who enforce it, the budgets that fund it, and the institutions that record it face a different set of political incentives than the ones that created them. Reforms need legal and institutional foundations distributed across more than one actor, broad ownership beyond a single administration or donor cycle, and financing to ensure it holds. Donor support should look towards the durability of the reforms created. Strengthened institutions and increased capacity, insulated from the ministries overseeing the reforms and communities treated as political actors capable of defending their own rights, not just beneficiaries of someone else’s.
Protecting land reform is not about preserving a predecessor’s legacy. It is about ensuring that the rights and institutions a reform creates survive the political cycle that produced them. Like Parsons argued, land tenure was never just a technical problem. It was always a question of power, and durability is what happens when that power is made to answer to something more permanent than whoever holds it next.