- ➔ Well-designed and enforceable tenure rights and transparent land markets are the foundations on which to build sustainable land management, but policies and regulations are needed to align incentives for private productivity with public benefits from ecosystem services.
- ➔ Restoring severely degraded land that requires a break from previous land use will be very different from reducing or reversing less severe land degradation on agricultural land through management practices, requiring different targeting, financial resources, monitoring and enforcement.
- ➔ Land-use regulations to improve land conditions across croplands, grasslands and forest lands, when appropriately enforced, tend to outperform incentive-based conservation schemes, which show mixed results.
- ➔ Combining regulatory and incentive-based approaches is often more effective than pursuing either approach exclusively, especially when addressing degradation challenges on agricultural land that requires diverse management practices.
- ➔ Policies and interventions aimed at reducing land degradation need to be targeted based on an understanding of how land is being degraded and the opportunity space of who manages the land, be they small or large producers.
Enabling the sustainable use and management of agricultural land while maintaining sufficient productivity to ensure food security requires consideration of the multiple causes of land and ecosystem degradation, which are exerting increasing pressure. Drivers at local, national and international level interact and influence the land-use decisions of producers (see Figure 5, Chapter 1). At the local level, resource endowments, including landholding size, drive access to inputs. At the national level, socioeconomic structure, including demographic and urbanization dynamics, domestic markets, infrastructure and environmental conditions, combine with policies and institutions to (dis-)incentivize land degradation. In parallel, international drivers of global trade, investments, climate change and associated commitments provide a wider context, creating both challenges and opportunities for policy interventions.
Unfortunately, institutional, policy and governance responses to address land degradation are often reactive and fragmented. Although land degradation is a central theme of three intersecting global challenges identified by the Rio Conventions (UNCCD, UNFCCC and CBD), national action plans remain siloed.1 Interventions typically target only specific and visible drivers of land degradation, failing to harness complementarities across objectives. However, a wide range of practices already exist to improve land conditions, which need to be scaled up before implementation becomes too costly.2
This chapter synthesizes policy interventions for sustainable land management, focusing on limiting land degradation, with a view to maintaining agricultural production while reducing environmental impacts. Based on the evidence presented in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, this chapter aims to provide insight into tailoring policy options based on the evidence presented on land degradation and the current distribution of farm sizes and yield gaps, highlighting the importance of context in designing effective interventions.
Foundations of sustainable land management
Secure and enforceable land tenure, together with transparent and well-functioning land markets, provides the institutional foundation for sustainable land management. These elements enable land users to make long-term investments in land quality, adopt sustainable practices and access credit, insurance and extension services. In their absence, land users – particularly smallholders, Indigenous Peoples and women – face increased risks of dispossession and exclusion from policy benefits, and inevitably rely on short-term land-use strategies. These dynamics can accelerate land degradation and undermine the provision of ecosystem services.1, 3
Tenure security has been shown to increase the likelihood of adopting sustainable land management practices, but only when rights are legally recognized and enforceable. In the Brazilian Amazon, for example, deforestation declined significantly only after Indigenous Peoples’ land rights became legally enforceable following full demarcation and certification.4, 5 Similarly, in Western Africa, formal titling reduced annual forest loss through increased on-farm tree planting and fallowing – an important way of restoring soil fertility.6, 7
Transparent land markets – including rental markets – can also improve land-use efficiency and sustainability. In Ethiopia, land certification facilitated more efficient land allocation through rentals, increasing productivity by up to 43 percent.8 Box 16 illustrates how land market development is evolving in sub-Saharan Africa, where rental and sales markets are expanding rapidly but remain shaped by broader rural transformation dynamics. However, formalization must be approached with caution. Without adequate safeguards, it can reinforce existing inequalities and encourage speculative land acquisition rather than productive use.9 Effective tenure systems must therefore include clear rules, equity safeguards and enforcement mechanisms that recognize overlapping and seasonal claims, especially in communal and agropastoral systems. 10
Box 16Land market development in sub-Saharan Africa
Land rental and sales markets are expanding rapidly across sub-Saharan Africa, where most smallholder farming continues to take place on customary land with limited market exchange. The empirical literature shows that in the early 2000s, land rental among smallholders nearly doubled in Malawi and tripled in Zambia.12
These changes have been associated with broader trends in rural transformation, including institutional changes, which in turn respond to broader demographic and economic forces such as population growth,12–16 migration, urbanization, and related shifts in the distribution of income and power across society.
Evidence on the economic and social impacts of land market participation in smallholder systems is nascent, given their early stage of development. Such markets can facilitate aggregate productivity increases – by transferring land from less productive to more productive users – as well as improve rural equity outcomes by equalizing factor ratios. Recent examples of such evidence include studies of smallholder land market participation in Ethiopia,8 Kenya,17 Malawi,12 Uganda,17the United Republic of Tanzania18 and Zambia.12
A longstanding policy concern is that the expansion of land markets may worsen inequality.16, 19–21 The “commodification” of land – transforming it into a tradable asset – along with the shift towards individualized tenure, may enable more powerful actors, both local and external, to displace poor residents via distress sales or coercion, a phenomenon often referred to as “land grabbing”. Land markets may also promote commercial agriculture and value chain concentration, excluding poorer farmers and increasing disparities.22 Additionally, commodification may erode communal rights to land and shared cultural heritage, weakening community institutions that support welfare outcomes.23
As land markets continue to develop, it will be important to monitor who gains and who loses – in both the short and the long term – to better understand the impact on smallholder productivity, welfare gains, incentives to invest in sustainable land management, and the region’s ongoing rural transformation.
Digital tools can support these efforts by accelerating the mapping and registration of land rights, improving transparency, and enabling bundled services such as land-based insurance and targeted financial products.11 Nonetheless, tenure reform alone is not sufficient for supporting sustainable land management. It must be embedded within a broader enabling environment that includes inclusive governance, equitable market access and strong institutions (Box 17).
Box 17Beyond tenure: Key enablers of sustainable land management
While secure and enforceable tenure and transparent land markets are foundational, their effectiveness at supporting sustainable land management depends on a broader enabling environment that shapes land users’ incentives and capacities. Key complementary enablers include the following:
- Market access. Reliable access to input, output and financial markets strengthens the economic case for long-term investments in sustainable practices. In particular, smallholders who are more risk averse and have shorter planning horizons tend to face enduring market constraints. Different forms of contractual arrangements (e.g. contract farming, cooperatives, vertical integration schemes) can reduce uncertainty, improve returns and help smallholders achieve scale to facilitate the implementation of land degradation neutrality initiatives.10, 24, 25
- Institutions and governance. Strong institutions are critical to creating an enabling environment for sustainable land management. The rules and structures that govern how land is accessed, used and transferred – such as land registries, inheritance systems, and both formal and informal dispute resolution mechanisms – shape incentives and determine outcomes on the ground. Where institutions are weak or fragmented, even well-designed policies may fall short of their full potential. Institutions that are designed with local conditions in mind also facilitate sustainable management of common resources, particularly in Indigenous Peoples’ territories and common lands, where locally grounded systems often outperform top-down approaches.26, 27
- Inclusive agrifood systems transformation. Structural challenges such as land fragmentation, demographic pressures and limited off-farm opportunities constrain how farmers use and transfer land, often forcing smallholders to overwork marginal plots and limiting the adoption of sustainable practices.28 Youth- and gender-sensitive policies, social protection and rural employment strategies are essential to reduce land pressure and support intergenerational land transfer.29, 30 Social pensions, for example, can reduce reliance on land as old-age security, encouraging land rental and more efficient land use.31
Together, these enablers create the conditions for land users to adopt sustainable practices, reduce degradation and contribute to land degradation neutrality.
While secure tenure and transparent land markets are essential foundations for sustainable land management, they are not sufficient on their own. Land degradation continues to occur even in contexts with strong enabling environments, highlighting that the alignment of private incentives with larger public benefits is not automatic. Without deliberate policy interventions, market failures, power imbalances and short-term economic pressures can still drive unsustainable land use and management. Therefore, enabling environments must be complemented by targeted measures that realign incentives and strengthen accountability to facilitate global, national and local action to address land degradation. The resulting overall benefits – derived primarily from ecosystem services in addition to provisioning services – far exceed the costs. Only through this broader systems approach can the full potential of tenure reform and land market development be realized.
