Strengthening land and property rights is central to reducing poverty, improving food security, advancing gender equality, supporting climate resilience, and promoting peaceful, sustainable societies. Clear, secure, and equitable land rights create the conditions for people, communities, governments, and investors to use land and natural resources productively and responsibly.
In many countries, land rights and land governance systems remain weak. Rights and claims to land are often undocumented, overlapping, or contested. Demand for land is rising due to population growth, urbanization, agricultural expansion, infrastructure development, climate pressures, conservation initiatives, carbon markets, and investment in energy and minerals. These pressures can fuel competition, displacement, conflict, and exclusion, particularly for women, Indigenous Peoples, pastoralists, smallholders, youth, and other groups with insecure rights.
Evidence from across the land sector shows that understanding, clarifying, recognizing, and enforcing land rights can have a powerful impact on individuals, households, communities, and societies. Secure land and resource rights can support investment, livelihoods, food production, environmental stewardship, resilience, and more inclusive governance.
Secure land and property rights create incentives for investment, trade, and responsible land use. They can contribute to job creation, local economic development, and broader prosperity. They also support better stewardship of land, forests, water, and other natural resources, helping to improve food security, agricultural productivity, biodiversity conservation, and climate resilience. By contrast, insecure land rights and weak land governance systems can drive conflict, instability, environmental degradation, and poverty.
Governments, civil society organizations, Indigenous and community organizations, researchers, the private sector, development partners, and international institutions increasingly recognize land rights as a central global development issue. Greater media attention, global policy commitments, and international frameworks such as the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests, the Principles for Responsible Investment in Agriculture and Food Systems, and the Sustainable Development Goals all point to the same conclusion: land rights are fundamental to equitable and sustainable development.
Key Issues
Expanding Economic Growth
Clear, secure, and transferable rights to land and resources are essential for long-term economic growth and development. Stronger land governance can increase investment, improve access to credit, support public revenue generation, reduce poverty, and create more predictable conditions for responsible economic activity. Effective land administration systems, transparent land information, and fair dispute resolution mechanisms are critical to ensuring that economic growth benefits people and communities, not only institutions or investors. Learn more »
Improving Food Security and Agricultural Productivity
Secure land rights reduce the threat of eviction, lower the risk of conflict, and give farmers and resource users greater confidence to invest in land, soil, water, crops, livestock, and infrastructure. When land rights are clear and protected, landholders are more likely to conserve and improve their land, adopt sustainable practices, and make long-term investments. Secure rights can also support land rental and land markets, enabling land to be used more productively when safeguards are in place to prevent dispossession and exclusion. Learn more »
Empowering Women and Ensuring Gender Equality
Women often have less access to, control over, and ownership of land and property. Their rights may be limited by discriminatory laws, social norms, inheritance practices, marital property regimes, or weak implementation of existing protections. This insecurity can restrict women’s economic opportunities and increase vulnerability to poverty, hunger, displacement, and violence.
Strengthening women’s land and property rights can improve household welfare, food security, nutrition, access to credit, income generation, and participation in decision-making. Gender-equitable land governance requires not only legal reform, but also implementation, awareness, documentation, institutional accountability, and support for women to claim and exercise their rights in practice. Learn more »
Addressing Global Climate Change and Improving Natural Resource Management
Secure land and resource rights are closely linked to sustainable natural resource management, biodiversity protection, and climate resilience. Communities and land users are more likely to invest in conservation, restoration, sustainable agriculture, forest management, and climate adaptation when their rights are recognized and protected.
Land governance is also central to climate action. Restoration programs, conservation areas, carbon markets, renewable energy projects, and transition mineral investments all have significant land implications. Integrating tenure security, community consent, transparency, and safeguards into climate and environmental policies is essential to ensuring that climate action does not deepen inequality or create new forms of dispossession. Learn more »
Improving Governance, Reducing Conflict, and Supporting Stability
Competition over land and natural resources is a major driver of conflict in many regions. Understanding the role of land in disputes can help policymakers, practitioners, and communities develop strategies to reduce tensions, prevent violence, and support peaceful resolution.
Strong land governance depends on inclusive institutions and transparent processes. This includes land administration, surveying and registration, land information systems, dispute resolution, public land management, land use planning, policy and legal reform, valuation, taxation, and mechanisms for public participation. Strengthening these systems can improve trust in institutions, reduce corruption, and support more accountable governance. Learn more »
Recognizing Customary and Community Tenure
In many countries, customary and community tenure systems exist alongside statutory legal systems. These systems have evolved over time to manage land, forests, grazing areas, water, and other shared resources according to local norms and institutions. They should not be treated as lesser or informal simply because they may not be fully documented or recognized by formal law.
Recognizing customary and community tenure can strengthen tenure security, support local governance, reduce conflict, and protect the rights of communities whose livelihoods, identities, and cultures are closely connected to land and natural resources. Effective approaches work with both customary and statutory institutions, while ensuring that the rights of women, youth, and marginalized groups are protected within community systems. Learn more »
Global Impact
Across the land sector, organizations and institutions are working to strengthen land tenure and resource rights through research, advocacy, policy reform, legal empowerment, land administration, participatory mapping, community documentation, dispute resolution, institutional capacity building, and open access to land information.
Collective progress can be measured through indicators such as:
- The number of households receiving formal or legally recognized documentation of land rights.
- The number of people benefiting from laws and policies that strengthen land and resource rights.
- The number of people trained on land, property, and resource governance.
- The number of communities with recognized customary or collective tenure rights.
- The extent to which land information is accessible, transparent, inclusive, and usable.
- The degree to which land governance systems protect the rights of women, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, displaced people, and other groups facing tenure insecurity.
Strengthening land rights is not only a technical issue. It is a governance, justice, development, climate, and human rights priority. Across the world, more secure, inclusive, and accountable land governance systems are essential for reducing poverty, preventing conflict, advancing equality, protecting ecosystems, and building more resilient societies.