Post Type: Blog

ODI Global’s North Stars for Northern Donors in a Post-Aid World is not a report about land governance. It does not set out a tenure agenda. It does not discuss cadastral reform, customary land, land administration, restitution, land markets, Indigenous territories, women’s land rights, or land conflict in any direct or sustained way.

That is exactly why the land sector should take it seriously.

The report is concerned with a larger question: what becomes of development cooperation when the political, financial, and moral architecture of aid no longer commands the same confidence? ODI describes a “post-aid” world not as the end of aid, but as a sign that the old social contract between Northern governments, taxpayers, and recipient countries has fractured. The opportunity, the report argues, is to think differently about why, how, and over what countries cooperate.

For those of us working on land and resource tenure security, this is more than a debate about donor reform. It is a warning and an opening.

The warning is that land governance cannot depend on the old machinery of donor-funded projects, short funding cycles, and technical assistance alone. The opening is that the next generation of global cooperation will need exactly what good land governance can offer: accountable institutions, legitimate decision-making, secure rights, trusted information, local voice, and ways to manage conflict over resources under pressure.

The land sector should not respond by asking how to preserve its place in yesterday’s aid model. We should ask what public purpose land governance must serve in the world now taking shape.

Land is where global transitions become local realities

The ODI report calls on Northern governments to widen the development cooperation toolbox beyond financial transfers, using diplomacy, technical knowledge, political capital, and regulatory influence to address structural barriers that leave countries exposed to climate vulnerabilities and constrained in their energy, food, and health sovereignty.

Land is not foregrounded in that argument. But it sits underneath it.

Climate adaptation happens on land. Food systems depend on land. Energy transitions require land. Forest protection, biodiversity conservation, mineral extraction, urban expansion, infrastructure, and disaster recovery all involve decisions about land and natural resources. Those decisions determine who is recognized, who is consulted, who is displaced, who benefits, and who can seek remedy when harms occur.

This is why land governance cannot be treated as a quiet technical specialty. It is part of the political infrastructure of transition.

A climate strategy that ignores tenure rights can deepen insecurity. A food-security strategy that overlooks women’s land rights can reproduce inequality. A renewable energy investment that fails to address consent, compensation, and local benefit-sharing can generate conflict. A conservation initiative that treats communities as threats rather than rights holders can undermine both justice and ecological outcomes.

The land sector’s message should be simple: no major transition is credible if the rights, claims, knowledge, and institutions connected to land are treated as afterthoughts.

The end of donorship should push us beyond project logic

One of ODI’s most important propositions is that ending Northern donorship requires more than replacing the word “donor” with “partner.” The report argues that former donors will need a different organizational template and mindset, with greater emphasis on policy change, diplomatic cooperation, knowledge initiatives, and control by others. It also argues that transition planning should begin at project design, with attention to how core functions, institutional responsibilities, resource flows, policy decisions, knowledge exchange, and relationships will be sustained after external support ends.

This should resonate deeply in the land sector.

Land governance work often takes place through projects, but land governance itself is not a project. It is a long-term public function. It involves laws, institutions, social norms, records, dispute-resolution systems, public information, political negotiation, and the everyday ability of people to claim and defend rights.

The sector has produced useful tools, pilots, methodologies, platforms, and reform processes. But we should be honest about the limits of project logic. Too often, success is measured through outputs that are visible within a funding cycle: parcels mapped, certificates issued, meetings held, laws drafted, officials trained, databases launched. These may matter. But they are not the same as durable tenure security.

The harder questions come later. Can records be updated? Can disputes be resolved fairly? Can women use documented rights in practice? Can communities challenge unlawful land allocations? Can public agencies maintain systems without external consultants? Can land information be accessed and understood by those most affected? Can reforms survive a change in government, budget, or political incentive?

A post-aid approach to land governance should begin with these questions, not end with them.

Country leadership must include the people whose rights are at stake

ODI’s fifth “North Star” calls for inclusive country leadership. It states clearly that state institutions are essential and cannot be bypassed, but should not be romanticized. It also argues that local actors closest to problems should have the most influence in defining and implementing solutions.

For land governance, this distinction is fundamental.

“Country-led” cannot mean central-government-led alone. Land is tied to sovereignty, but it is also tied to belonging, inheritance, gender relations, customary authority, livelihoods, housing, identity, and political power. The people most affected by land decisions are often those with the least influence over formal policy processes.

Women may hold rights that are legally recognized but socially constrained. Indigenous Peoples and local communities may govern territories that are mapped as state land. Pastoralists may depend on mobility that fixed-boundary systems fail to recognize. Informal settlement residents may live in places that public authorities describe primarily as problems to be cleared. Displaced people may face housing, land, and property claims that outlast the emergency phase. Smallholders may confront investment decisions negotiated far from the land itself.

The land sector should therefore argue for country leadership that is nationally anchored, locally accountable, and rights-aware.

This means working with public institutions, not around them. But it also means investing in civic space, legal empowerment, community organizations, women’s rights advocates, Indigenous and local knowledge, independent research, public-interest data, and media capable of scrutinizing land decisions.

ODI rightly notes that in fragile and conflict-affected contexts there is little room for romantic assumptions about state benevolence, and that external actors need patience, presence, risk tolerance, flexible support to local actors, and courage to raise civic space in policy dialogue.

That is not a footnote for land governance. It is often the center of the work.

The land sector needs a wider toolbox too

ODI’s call for a wider development cooperation toolbox should prompt a similar shift within our own sector.

Land governance support cannot be limited to land administration, even though land administration remains important. The next phase of land governance work must bring together law, public finance, political economy, open and responsible data, institutional reform, dispute resolution, community capacity, safeguards, and accountability.

That means supporting transparent public land allocation. It means scrutinizing land-based concessions. It means strengthening safeguards for carbon markets, biodiversity finance, mining, infrastructure, and renewable energy. It means ensuring that grievance mechanisms are usable, not merely present. It means protecting land and environmental defenders. It means helping journalists, researchers, and civil society organizations access and interpret land information. It means improving compensation, resettlement, and restitution processes where displacement has occurred. It means placing women’s land rights and collective tenure at the center, not as thematic additions.

It also means being more careful with technology.

Digital land systems, geospatial tools, satellite imagery, and artificial intelligence can improve transparency and efficiency. They can also accelerate exclusion if rights are poorly defined, data governance is weak, or affected people cannot see, question, correct, or use the information that shapes decisions about their land.

Land data is not neutral simply because it is digital. It is part of governance. It should be treated as public-interest infrastructure, with clear rules for accessibility, privacy, accountability, interoperability, and community protection.

Multilateral reform should give land a clearer home without creating another silo

ODI argues that a reformed multilateral development system should be grounded in a shared vision, and that bilateral financing should no longer be the default. The report notes that multilateral institutions can offer reach, scale, and expertise no individual donor can replicate alone, while also questioning whether the UN Development System has a sufficiently clear purpose for the next era.

Land governance has long suffered from a related problem: it is everywhere and nowhere.

It appears in food systems, forests, climate, cities, conflict, gender equality, investment, Indigenous rights, disaster recovery, and biodiversity. It is relevant to FAO, IFAD, UN-Habitat, UNDP, UNEP, human rights mechanisms, climate funds, regional development banks, and the World Bank. Yet because it is spread across so many mandates, it often lacks sustained political priority.

The answer is not necessarily to create another institutional silo. The answer is to make land governance more coherent across the systems that already shape land outcomes.

Multilateral institutions can help where they provide normative guidance, safeguards, technical standards, peer learning, long-term capacity, and public goods. But the value of multilateralism should not be judged by the size of the channel. It should be judged by whether it strengthens legitimate tenure rights, improves accountability, reduces harm, supports local institutions, and makes land-related decisions more transparent and contestable.

We must rebuild the public case for land governance

ODI argues that donors should stop looking for public support for development cooperation and start building it. Development cooperation, the report notes, is often a low-salience issue, vulnerable to political pressure and public misunderstanding. It calls for credible messengers, stronger stories, public education, and people-to-people connections.

The land sector has the same challenge.

We often speak to each other in technical language and then wonder why land governance is missing from broader political debates. We say land rights are foundational, but we do not always show what that means in terms that matter to people outside the sector.

We need a stronger public narrative.

Not a simplistic narrative. Not a donor-branded success story. Not another generic claim that land is “critical.” We need to explain how land governance shapes decisions people can understand: whether a family can stay in its home; whether a farmer can invest in soil and trees; whether a woman can inherit; whether a community can negotiate with an investor; whether a city can upgrade settlements without forced eviction; whether conservation respects rights; whether renewable energy projects build trust or conflict; whether displaced people can return, resettle, or rebuild.

The future of land governance depends not only on better evidence, but on better public meaning.

Governance reform starts with us

ODI’s final and perhaps most important proposition is that Northern donors should commit to governance reform of the development cooperation system. The report argues that more equitable governance is the foundation for a shared, legitimate, and broadly supported post-aid system.

The land sector should apply that challenge to itself.

Who sets the agenda? Who defines evidence? Who controls data? Who receives flexible funding? Who is invited to speak, and who is asked only to validate decisions already made? Which languages dominate? Which forms of local knowledge are taken seriously? Which organizations are treated as strategic actors, and which are treated as implementers?

If we want development cooperation to move beyond donorship, land governance must move beyond consultation as performance.

Rights holders and local institutions should help shape priorities, research questions, risk assessments, data governance, monitoring, and accountability. This is not only an ethical point. It is a practical one. Land reforms that do not reflect lived realities often fail in implementation. Land data that people cannot access or trust will not support accountability. Land investments that ignore power will produce conflict.

What the land sector should say now

The ODI report does not give the land sector an agenda. We should not pretend that it does.

It gives us something more useful: a challenge to define our own agenda in a changing development landscape.

The land sector should respond by saying that tenure security is not a niche concern, a project category, or a technical deliverable. It is part of the governance foundation for climate resilience, food security, gender equality, responsible investment, biodiversity, peace, urban development, and fair economic opportunity.

We should say that future land governance work must be less donor-centered and more durable. Less focused on short-term visibility and more focused on public systems, civic capacity, and rights that can be used in practice. Less comfortable with technical fixes and more honest about power. Less fragmented across sectors and more fluent in the transitions reshaping land and resource use.

And we should say that land governance deserves investment not because it fits neatly into the old aid model, but because it helps answer the defining question of the post-aid era: how can societies make legitimate, accountable, and equitable decisions about the resources on which their futures depend?

That is where the land sector belongs.

Not at the margins of development cooperation, waiting to be included.

At the center of the choices that will determine whether cooperation has public purpose at all.

Reflections from the LANDac 2026 session, “Shadows of Green: The Global Green Transition as a Space of Conflict and Community Claims”

The green transition is often described in terms of technology: solar capacity, wind corridors, battery minerals, carbon credits, protected areas, and restoration targets. But every one of these ambitions has a geography. It requires land, water, forests, minerals, access routes, and authority over who gets to decide how a place will be used.

That is why the transition is not only an environmental or economic project. It is a territorial and political one.

At the LANDac Annual Conference in Utrecht on July 2, the session Shadows of Green brought this reality into sharp focus. Convened by the International Land Coalition (ILC), the discussion connected case studies from Suriname, Kosovo, and Nepal with wider research on how climate, energy, and conservation initiatives can alter land access, control, and use. The session sat squarely within LANDac’s broader 2026 focus on the relationships among land, conflict, justice, and peace.

The central message was not that renewable energy, biodiversity conservation, carbon finance, or restoration are inherently harmful. They are necessary parts of responding to climate disruption and ecological decline. The real question is whether these interventions deepen rights, agency, and accountability, or whether they reproduce old patterns of dispossession under a new green vocabulary.

A low-carbon project that removes people from their land without meaningful consent, excludes them from benefits, or criminalizes customary livelihoods may reduce emissions on paper. It cannot credibly be called a just transition.

The conflict begins when projects overwrite territories

Danique de Ronde’s opening framing drew on two ILC research series: Shadows of Green, examining land-related conflicts linked to green initiatives, and Wisdom of the Land, exploring how communities use evidence, customary knowledge, and geospatial data to defend land claims and sustain ecosystems. Together, the research covered 32 case studies in 26 countries.

The Shadows of Green research identifies six recurring pathways through which environmental initiatives can generate conflict: dispossession under climate agendas; exclusionary conservation; commodification of land and nature; unequal benefit sharing; technocratic governance and loss of commons; and the political instrumentalization of green narratives.

This typology matters because it moves the debate beyond the misleading suggestion that conflict is simply a failure of communication. Often, the disagreement is not about whether a community “understands” a project. It is about who has power to define the project, whose knowledge is accepted, who bears the risk, and who captures the value.

The session captured this tension as a clash between two narratives. In one, nature is translated into quantifiable assets: carbon stocks, lithium reserves, protected hectares, or biodiversity units. Land becomes a neutral surface awaiting more efficient management. In the other, territory is understood as a living social-ecological system: a place of livelihood, memory, identity, customary authority, care, and intergenerational responsibility.

The problem is not measurement itself. Data can illuminate harm, support public accountability, and strengthen community claims. The problem arises when quantification displaces politics, when a carbon map becomes more authoritative than the people who have governed a forest for generations.

That is the shadow cast by too many green interventions: they treat rights holders as an obstacle to be managed rather than as decision-makers with legitimate authority.

Evidence can be a shield, but only when communities control it

Sara Ramirez’s presentation from Suriname offered a powerful alternative. Her work on participatory mapping showed that spatial data need not be extracted from communities for external planning purposes. It can be co-produced with communities, governed by them, and used to strengthen their own priorities.

The examples ranged from Indigenous participation in conservation planning in southern Suriname to mapping marine conflicts for spatial planning. The most striking case concerned the Saamaka people, whose territory faces longstanding pressure from logging, mining, roads, and other external activity. Participatory mapping and monitoring helped make visible not only how the territory is used, but also how concessions and infrastructure intersect with places of cultural, ecological, and livelihood importance.

This work has particular legal resonance. In 2007, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights held that Suriname must recognize and protect the collective property rights of the Saramaka people, delimit and title their territory, and ensure effective consultation or, where required, free, prior, and informed consent for development or investment projects affecting that territory. The judgment also addressed benefit sharing and safeguards against harm.

The distinction is important. Communities do not need data merely to become legible to government, investors, or courts. They need evidence that strengthens their own ability to negotiate, mobilize, monitor, and decide.

This is why data governance must be part of tenure security. Who collects the data? Who interprets it? Who stores it? Who can disclose it? Who is protected when the data reveal illegal activity, overlapping claims, or powerful commercial interests?

Maps can strengthen land rights. They can also make territory more visible to those seeking to control it. The difference lies in whether communities retain agency over the knowledge they share and whether legal and political systems are prepared to act on what that knowledge reveals.

The ILC’s Wisdom of the Land report makes a similar point across multiple country cases: traditional ecological knowledge, community governance, and geospatial evidence are most powerful when they reinforce each other rather than compete for legitimacy.

The energy transition has a past as well as a future

Odeta Naks’ case study from Kosovo brought attention to what might be called the “tail” of the energy transition. Public debate often focuses on the infrastructure of the future: renewable energy installations, transmission networks, critical minerals, and new industrial corridors. Far less attention is paid to the land insecurity left by fossil-fuel development and conflict.

The Kosovo case highlighted the interaction between post-conflict land insecurity, incomplete cadastral records, ethnic-minority claims, and former coal-mining areas.

This is a crucial reminder. The green transition does not arrive on a blank slate. It lands on territories shaped by war, displacement, extractive economies, weak records, unresolved restitution, and unequal citizenship.

A country may close mines or shift its energy mix while communities continue to live with the consequences of past extraction. If land governance is treated as an administrative afterthought, the transition can leave old injustices intact while introducing new ones.

The test of a just energy transition should therefore not be limited to megawatts installed or emissions avoided. It should also ask: Have historic land claims been addressed? Are affected groups able to participate in decisions? Are women, ethnic minorities, and displaced people recognized as rights holders? Does the transition reduce insecurity, or simply redirect it?

Conservation should not mean power without accountability

Aparajita Gautam’s case study from Nepal addressed another uncomfortable reality: conservation can produce social, economic, administrative, and physical forms of violence when it expands without accountable governance.

Her presentation documented intimidation and power struggles in the buffer zones of two national parks, showing how conservation can restrict or reshape local access to land, forests, and livelihoods.

This does not mean conservation and community land rights are incompatible. Quite the opposite. Conservation that sidelines communities often undermines the legitimacy and practical effectiveness it needs to endure.

Mike Taylor’s reflection following the session made this point well: conservation need not be in conflict with Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ struggles for land rights. Securing rights to land and natural resources can be a foundation for effective biodiversity conservation and stewardship, rather than a concession made after the fact. This is also reflected in work by Anthropos Africa with Indigenous communities and institutions in southern Africa to expand and restore rights, land, and livelihoods.

International commitments already point in this direction. Target 22 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework calls for the full, equitable, and inclusive participation of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in biodiversity-related decision-making, including access to justice and information.

The issue is implementation. Participation cannot mean being invited into a meeting after boundaries have been drawn, contracts signed, or conservation rules imposed. It must mean real influence over whether an intervention proceeds, where it is located, how it is governed, and how benefits and burdens are shared.

From compelling cases to lasting institutional change

Gemma Betsema of RVO’s LAND-at-scale program brought an essential programmatic perspective to the discussion. Her reflections underscored that evidence of conflict is most valuable when it does more than document harm: it must inform longer-term engagement, adaptive programming, and changes in the institutions that shape land governance. She noted the importance of moving beyond isolated projects toward structural change, while connecting knowledge generated at community level with the policy, financing, and institutional decisions made at national and international levels. This is a demanding task for funders. It requires patience, political awareness, and a willingness to support learning over time rather than expecting short project cycles to resolve entrenched land conflicts.

Communities facing pressure from conservation, extractive industries, carbon markets, or energy infrastructure are rarely confronting a one-off event. They are navigating overlapping histories of exclusion, unequal power, and weak legal protection. A just transition therefore needs more than good safeguards at project approval. It needs sustained support for local institutions, community evidence, legal capacity, and the slower work of changing the rules that determine whose land claims count.

From safeguards to a “do not dispossess” standard

The discussion in Utrecht also raised a harder question for funders, governments, NGOs, investors, and technical agencies: are current safeguards sufficient?

Too often, land rights enter green projects as a compliance requirement near the end of the design process. A social assessment is commissioned. A consultation is held. A grievance mechanism is created. These may be necessary, but they are not enough when the core decision about territorial control has already been made elsewhere.

A genuinely just transition needs a stronger standard: do not dispossess in the name of climate or biodiversity action.

That standard would have practical consequences.

First, tenure and conflict analysis must come before site selection, financing, and project approval. Environmental and social impact assessments should examine collective, customary, seasonal, overlapping, and women’s land and resource rights, not only formal title.

Second, consultation must give way to meaningful decision-making power. For Indigenous Peoples, free, prior, and informed consent is not a public-relations exercise. It is rooted in the right to determine development priorities and strategies affecting their lands and resources.

Third, community legal support, mapping capacity, and local monitoring should be treated as core transition infrastructure. Philanthropic and public funders increasingly recognize the importance of land rights, but that recognition must be reflected in long-term support for local institutions, not only short project cycles.

Fourth, benefit sharing must be transparent, enforceable, and designed with communities rather than announced to them. The monetization of carbon, biodiversity, and other common-pool resources may create opportunities for communities, but only where rights are secure, governance is fair, and communities have the power to refuse harmful arrangements.

Finally, every green investment needs a gender-transformative lens. Conflict and dispossession are not experienced equally. Women’s rights, inheritance, access to commons, participation in local institutions, and control over benefits must be considered from the beginning. Otherwise, a project may reproduce inequalities within communities even while presenting itself as inclusive.

The Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure provide a useful reference point: states should recognize and protect legitimate tenure rights, including those of Indigenous Peoples and communities with customary tenure systems.

There can be no lasting peace without land justice

The most important contribution of Shadows of Green was to place land justice at the center of environmental action.

Climate and biodiversity policies are often discussed as urgent technical imperatives. They are urgent. But urgency is not a license to bypass rights, compress deliberation, or make territorial decisions on behalf of people who will live with their consequences.

Conflict is sometimes described as an unfortunate side effect of transition. It is more accurate to see it as a warning signal. It can expose inequalities in land access, legal recognition, gender, ethnicity, citizenship, and political representation that have been ignored for too long.

The task is not to eliminate conflict by silencing claims. It is to build institutions capable of hearing them, responding fairly, and changing course when a project threatens to deepen injustice.

The green transition will only be durable if it is more than a transition in energy sources or conservation finance. It must be a transition in power: from projects to territories, from extraction to stewardship, from consultation to shared authority, and from invisible claims to secure and enforceable rights.

There can be no peaceful transition without land justice. And there can be no credible climate or biodiversity strategy that treats the people who protect land, forests, water, and rangelands as expendable.

Land governance in Tamil Nadu was the subject of sustained discussion at the ILDC Regional Dialogue on Land, Governance and Coastal Futures, held in Chennai on June 19–20, 2026. The event convened researchers, panchayat representatives, practitioners, and civil society organizations engaged in questions of land, livelihoods, governance, and coastal sustainability. The dialogue’s framing was direct: despite being the first tier of local self-governance, gram sabhas and panchayats are routinely side-lined in decisions over land, associated resources, and access to livelihoods, even as industrial expansion, port development, and infrastructure displace coastal and rural communities. Its second day focused on the role gram sabhas and panchayats can — and currently cannot — play in governing coastal and infrastructure-related land: ports and Special Economic Zones (SEZs), industrial pressure, displacement, and the adequacy of frameworks such as the CRZ notification, the Land Acquisition Act of 2013, and environmental impact assessment processes.

The discussion drew out a distinction that earlier conversations on village and forest commons had already begun to surface: terrestrial and aquatic commons are not the same, and neither are the communities that depend on them. As Sridhar Raghavan, who moderated the discussions on coastal commons, and Saravanan of the Coastal Resource Centre, Chennai, pointed out, the coast is increasingly treated as a frontier (or gold mine) — “vacant,” free resource the state can allocate to private investors in the name of economic development. This framing erases the customary governance through which fishing communities have managed beaches, landing sites, drying yards, and inshore waters for generations.

Unlike agricultural or forest land, coastal commons are fluid, seasonal, and shared across overlapping users—harder to map and therefore more easily treated as vacant or available for state allocation, making them especially vulnerable to enclosure. Coastal communities are also distinct from terrestrial populations: their livelihoods depend on access to interconnected land-, sea-, and shore-based commons, yet governance and tenure systems continue to be designed largely through a terrestrial lens.

The Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) framework illustrates this well. While it requires Coastal Zone Management Plans to demarcate fishing villages and commons, recognition in practice has been partial and contested. In Puducherry, fisher panchayats found government draft maps left out large stretches of eco-sensitive areas and seine-fishing grounds their own community surveys had documented — over 1,200 acres missed by official satellite-based mapping. Similar protests over missing villages and commons have surfaced in Tamil Nadu, Goa, and Maharashtra, suggesting a structural gap in how the state sees the coast, not an isolated error. That panchayats, the institutions closest to the commons, remain structurally absent from coastal land-use decisions is itself a tenure security problem, not merely a procedural one — the body best placed to certify customary use has no statutory seat when ports, energy projects, or industrial corridors are approved.

One concrete way to close this gap was set out in a research paper on marine bioregions, which argued for coastal panchayats to be given statutory jurisdiction over the inshore 4 nautical miles of the state’s 12-nautical-mile territorial waters — the zone where small-scale and artisanal fishers actually operate, and which is currently governed, if at all, as an extension of state fisheries departments rather than as a commons under local self-governance. Some semblance of this already exists in Indonesia. In Aceh in Indonesia, the Panglima Laot — a customary institution of “sea commanders” dating to the Sultanate period and now formally recognised under Aceh’s 2008 Qanun on Customary Institutions — has long enforced fishing rules, allocated fishing grounds, and resolved disputes within its own stretch of coastal sea, with the state deferring to that customary authority rather than displacing it. The precedent suggests that statutory recognition of local sea tenure is not just legally feasible but has working models elsewhere in the region; India’s coastal panchayats currently have no equivalent foothold in law.

This gap matters more given the speed at which new claims on coastal space are being made. The Sagar Mala programme, the central government’s port-led development push, is a case in point. In Nagapattinam, plans to expand the port into a greenfield facility and convert it into an economic zone under Sagar Mala have been opposed by the local fishing community, which fears restrictions on access and livelihood. The pattern is not unique to Tamil Nadu — in Karnataka’s Honnavara, ninety acres of commons land were handed to a private port company beside an existing fishing harbour identified as turtle nesting ground, while the overwhelming share of Sagar Mala investment goes toward harbour infrastructure rather than community development.

Energy transition projects add a new layer of pressure on coastal commons. Around Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu, fishers have learned — often informally and late — about proposed offshore wind installations in the Gulf of Mannar, a biosphere reserve some 110,000 fishing families across 268 villages depend on. “We know no details, nobody has discussed it with us… we are seriously concerned and we are against it,” said Jesu Rathinam, a long-time activist based in Nagapattinam. Fishers already work within a narrow strip of sea — about five nautical miles before risking arrest by the Sri Lankan navy — and fear turbines and undersea cables will shrink that space further while disrupting breeding grounds.

Rameswaram’s commons are eroding from the land side too. In Ariyankundu, artisanal fishers allege shrimp farms built without observing the mandatory 200-metre setback from the high tide line have polluted groundwater and encroached on community commons, destroying coral formations that both protect the shore from erosion and serve as fish breeding sites. Locals note the farm owners are outsiders, and the operations create no economic benefit for fishers themselves — a familiar feature of “blue economy” investment that bypasses the people who depend on the resource.

Across Nagapattinam, Rameswaram, and Puducherry, a common thread is the absence of secure, legally recognised tenure over coastal commons. Equally significant is the lack of a local governance institution empowered to assert and defend these rights—a concern that emerged repeatedly during the discussions at the Chennai dialogue. Customary use has not been transformed into a legally enforceable tenure right. As a result, the state is under no obligation to negotiate with customary users, and may instead choose to overlook or selectively accommodate their presence.  Strengthening panchayats’ legal standing over coastal and common land would not by itself resolve these conflicts, but it would at least give communities a recognised seat when decisions are made, rather than leaving them to learn of projects after the fact. Until coastal commons are mapped, governed, and titled with fishers and their local institutions as co-authors rather than affected bystanders, every new port, energy project, or aquaculture lease will keep arriving as a fait accompli rather than a negotiation.

Note:

Dr. John Kurien, a steadfast advocate of community management of coastal commons, has long maintained that aquatic commons differ fundamentally from terrestrial commons—and so do the communities that inhabit and depend on them. The discussions at ILDC’s Chennai Regional Dialogue in June 2026 brought this insight to life, helping me better understand the distinctive character of aquatic commons and their commoners.

Shivakumar Srinivas

Nandakumar Siva

Fr. John Kumar S.J.

Across Tamil Nadu, many communities depend on village commons, water bodies, forests, agricultural lands, and coastal resources for their daily lives and livelihoods. These shared resources are coming under increasing pressure from urbanisation, infrastructure projects, industrial activity, and competing land uses. The effects are often felt most directly by those with the fewest resources or the least voice in decision-making.

In many parts of Tamil Nadu, village commons and poramboke lands face encroachment and conversion. Water bodies and tank systems are under pressure. Forest-dependent communities continue to face difficulties in securing their rights. Agricultural land is being diverted to non-agricultural uses. Coastal communities are navigating growing pressures from development projects (e.g., tidal wave energy projects) and changing coastlines. These are not new challenges, but they are becoming more acute.

The constitutional framework gives panchayats and municipalities an important role in local governance, including responsibilities related to land, natural resources, and community welfare. In practice, however, critical decisions are often taken at higher levels of government, with limited involvement of local bodies or the communities most affected. Strengthening local participation in these decisions — not as a solution in itself, but as a step towards more accountable governance — is what this workshop is about.

About the Workshop

The India Land and Development Conference (ILDC), along with its partner groups, is bringing together around 100 participants in Chennai on 19–20 June 2026 for a two-day regional workshop on land governance and the role of local governments alongside a discussion on village and coastal commons. The group includes panchayat leaders, municipal representatives, grassroots organisations, researchers, and civil society practitioners from across Tamil Nadu.

Conversations will be organised around six themes: village commons and poramboke lands; water bodies and tank governance; forest rights and tribal communities; ecology, biodiversity, and agricultural land use; urban land and displacement; and coastal tenure and fisher rights. The format includes panel discussions, small group sessions, and open plenaries, with space for participants to share their own experiences and perspectives.

From Dialogue to Action

The workshop will produce a summary of key findings and recommendations across the thematic areas, along with a charter of shared priorities to strengthen the role of local governments in land and natural resource governance. It will also identify key themes for future dialogue on commons governance. Participants will explore the formation of an ongoing peer-learning network to continue these discussions.

The Chennai workshop is a modest step towards thinking through, together, how local governments and communities can play a more meaningful role in land governance.

Note: As the workshop unfolds and in the weeks thereafter, Tenure Security will provide a platform for participants to share their reflections, insights, and learning from the dialogue.

There is a quiet assumption embedded in almost every climate intervention that touches farmland. It runs through NbS project designs, food systems traceability platforms, RE siting frameworks, and carbon market methodology documents alike. The assumption is this: that the person named in land document, mostly referred as land record, is the person whose decision or behaviour determines what happens on that land.

This assumption is almost always wrong. And the consequences of that wrongness — for climate outcomes, for community equity, and for the long-term integrity of the interventions themselves — are more serious than most practitioners have reckoned with.

Land Is Not What the Title Says It Is

“Land is not simply a resource or a commodity. It is a social, legal, ecological, cultural, and political question.”

This is not philosophical throat-clearing. It is the most practical thing a climate practitioner must hear. Every intervention that treats land as a commodity, a carbon sink, a supply chain input, or a renewable energy site is making a category error from the outset if it ignores the social, legal, ecological, and political web of relations that actually governs what that land does, and who it does it for.

The formal land record, the Record of Rights, the cadastral map, the land parcel boundary in a GIS system — captures some details about a named individual, parcel and the state, more  with a transactional objective. It tells, who can sell the land, mortgage it, and receive compensation if it is acquired. What it does not tell, and what it was never designed to tell you, is who actually farms it, who grazes it between crops, who depends on it for their livelihoods or culture, who protects the watershed or forest that feeds it water, nutrition and pollination, and who will bear the consequences when a climate shock, a carbon project, or a solar farm arrives.

The Five Invisible Stakeholders on Every Farm

In any piece of agricultural land in South Asia — a rainfed plot in the Gangetic plain, a terraced field in the hills of Nepal, a smallholder farm on the edge of a forest in Bangladesh. The land record or document may show a single owner. The reality on the ground is almost always a layered, overlapping web of at least five distinct groups of people with real, substantive relationships to that land — none of whom may appear in the record.

1. The tenant, the sharecropper, the woman farmer, the agricultural labourer: These are people who till the soil, contribute to decisions about what to plant, manage soil health, and extract the harvest. They exercise genuine, functional tenure – access, use, manage and extract  the land. Their care, persistence, adaptability and what we might recognise as local ecological knowledge, are precisely the kind of engagements, that climate resilience depends on. Yet they are invisible in the public farm service program who transfers subsid/grant to bank account of recorded land owner, to the carbon project developer who consults the land record, invisible to the food company conducting supplier due diligence, and invisible to the RE developer seeking consent from the “landowner.”
2. The fallow-season users : When the crop is harvested and the land lies fallow, it does not stand empty. Landless and herders bring their animals to graze. Village youth use it as a playground. Families gather fodder and fuel. Women collect seasonal produce. The land is, in this period, a commons — accessed, managed, and depended upon by people whose names never appear in any title document, but whose livelihoods are directly at stake when a solar park fence goes up or a carbon project recommends change in land use.
3. The upstream contributors : Perhaps the most conceptually challenging group: people who do not use or access or directly derive any benefit the agricultural land at all, but whose actions on other land directly conditions on it, making it usable as a farm land. The community that protects the commons- the wetlands, pasture land in the village landscape mosaic or care the forests on the ridge above, supports the moisture regime, the pollination, the nutrient flow, and the microclimate of the farmland below. They are, in the most meaningful ecological sense, the ignored tenure holders of that farmland’s productivity — but neither tenure law nor project design has any category for them. NbS interventions that reward the forest community and the farmer separately, without recognising this connection and relationship, risk breaking the very ecological chain they are supposed to protect.
4. The power-holders: On many landscapes, the person who actually determines what happens on the land is neither the titled owner nor any of the productive users above. It is a local power-broker: a village leader, a trader, a money-lender, a political figure who controls access, dictates terms, often decide the crop choice and takes a share of the surplus. Any traceability system, carbon registry, or value chain initiative that conducts due diligence with the formal landowner while ignoring these power relations is conducting due diligence on a fiction.
5. The emotionally and ecologically connected:  The final category is the most easily dismissed and perhaps the most consequential for the long term: communities whose connection to a piece of land is mediated not through use or ownership but through a sacred tree, a migratory species, a water source, an ancestral memory. These communities may have no legal claim and no day-to-day management role, yet their connection is threatened,  when the tree is felled for a solar project, when the grassland that supports their sacred species is converted to a carbon plantation. Then they become active and powerful actors in shaping what that land does and does not permit. Ignoring them in project design does not make them disappear; it makes them opponents.

Is Formalisation a Trap for NbS and Carbon Markets?

Here is where the argument becomes most urgent for practitioners in NbS, carbon markets, and RE transitions specifically.

The default response to tenure complexity in climate project design is formalisation: map the land, title the owner, document the rights, create the contract. This feels like due diligence. It feels like inclusion. It is frequently neither. Rather on ground, it would lead to exclusion, injustice; often triggering conflict and adding risk to very resilience and permanence that such climate investments look at.

What this Means for Climate and Food Intervention?

For practitioners across the four domains, here are what the implications look like.

For NbS designers and implementers: Your theory of change almost certainly passes through tenure. If your intervention involves changing land use — planting trees, restoring grasslands, creating buffer zones, shifting from annual crops to perennials — you are changing the tenure, the land-people relations, for every one of the five invisible stakeholder groups described above, whether you intend to or not. Tenant or women farmers will lose access to land they depend on or will be required to put more labour, without any matching benefits. Fallow-season users run the risk of being excluded from areas the project now controls. Upstream communities will find their traditional forest management reclassified as a carbon asset belonging to someone else. Designing for tenure complexity is not a safeguard add-on to an NbS project. It is the intervention that any NbS investment must not ignore, if they aim intended result.

For traceability practitioners: Your supplier due diligence and traceability systems are reading land records and mistaking them for ground truth. The smallholder farmer who appears in your system as the “landowner” may be farming on land they share with a tenant, borrowing land from a relative, or managing a plot whose actual productive decisions are controlled by a trader-creditor. Deforestation-free commitments, living income benchmarks, and regenerative agriculture certification all require understanding not just who owns the land on paper, but who works it, who depends on it, and who has the power to change what happens on it. Traceability without tenure intelligence is traceability without integrity, and may not serve the purpose otherwise.

For renewable energy developers and siting teams: The social licence problem that has slowed RE deployment across South Asia is substantially a tenure problem. Projects that consult the titled landowner and bypass the tenant, the fallow-season user, and the power-holder do not have community consent — they have a signed document. The difference becomes apparent when construction begins. More fundamentally, RE siting that converts productive agricultural or agroforestry land — particularly land with high tenure complexity and multiple invisible users — creates climate injustice even as it delivers climate mitigation. The question is not just whether the land is “available.” It is whether the transition is tenure-just?

For carbon market developers and climate finance practitioners: This may be the most urgent message of all. Carbon and climate finance that treats tenure as a compliance checkbox — something to tick before the real work of carbon accounting begins — will fail ecologically and socially. Projects that skip genuine tenure due diligence do not just risk community resistance. They risk undermining the very ecological conditions their carbon claims depend on. A community whose customary tenure arrangements have been disrupted by a REDD+ or NbS project does not continue to manage the forest the way they did before. The carbon is not permanent. It never was, because the governance was never secure. Tenure due diligence is not a legal formality. It is the ecological foundation of carbon integrity.

The Framework That Is Imperative

This 360 degree framing  brings a spectrum that is worth taking seriously as a practical planning tool. At one end: relational land systems, where land is identity, stewardship, and collective accountability. At the other: transactional land systems, where land is a commodity, a carbon asset, a market instrument. Most landscapes in South Asia occupy a hybrid, contested middle ground — and the most important insight is that both relational and transactional approaches can reproduce inequality if poorly designed.

The question for practitioners is not which end of the spectrum to push toward, but how to design interventions that genuinely strengthen the relational systems that underpin social justice and ecological resilience while providing the security and recognition that transactional engagement requires.

This is not a both-and compromise. It is a fundamentally different design logic — one that starts by asking, before any project document is written: who actually governs this land, under what conditions and terms, and with what consequences for climate resilience if we intervene?

The evolution of land governance thinking in most countries, can be mapped in four words: from Revenue (colonial-era extraction) to Reform (rights-based redistribution) to Record (digitisation and formalisation) to Relation (the recognition that governance is ultimately about people and their connections to land, not about documents).

Most climate projects are operating at the Record stage and calling it progress. The work ahead is to move to Relation — and to do so with the urgency that the climate timeline demands.

A Closing Provocation

Aldo Leopold wrote that conservation is harmony between people and land. The word he used was (wo)men, a deliberate correction that places the gendered dimensions of land access at the centre of the conservation project.

Harmony, in the context of climate action on farmland, means recognising that the land being intervened on is already full — full of relationships, dependencies, histories, and ecological knowledge that your project design did not create and cannot replace. The question is whether such external intervention will work with those relationships or against them.

Every climate project that lands on farmland without understanding the tenure relations governing it is not just missing an opportunity. It is, in the most specific and measurable sense, a climate risk.

The land record is not lying out of malice. It was never designed to tell what you need to know in the climate contexts. The work of climate-responsive land governance is to build the tools, the protocols, and the institutional will to see what the present record cannot show — and to govern accordingly.

This blog draws on Pranab Ranjan Choudhury’s session on Land Tenure, Land Use and Climate: A Nexus Perspective, delivered at the Summer School on Climate Responsive Land Governance, Dhulikhel, Nepal, April 2026, and on the multi-tenure framework he has been arguing for as a way forward for climate actions.