Researchers from the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) played a key role in a major global summit on land governance held recently in Cartagena, Colombia.
More than 4,000 representatives from governments, social movements, civil society organizations, international institutions and academia gathered for the 20-year follow-up to the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20). The summit focused on one central question: how to democratize access to and control over land.
Land governance is closely connected to some of the world’s most urgent challenges, including food systems, climate change, biodiversity protection, labour and livelihoods, and peacebuilding. Discussions in Cartagena highlighted the importance of land for Indigenous peoples and other rural communities such as farmers, pastoralists and fishers across both the Global South and the Global North.
Current global patterns illustrate the scale of the issue. Today, around 1% of farms control roughly 70% of the world’s agricultural land, while the bottom 40% of farms operate only about 3% of global farmland.
‘It was electrifying to see how strongly different groups around the world affirmed the central role of land in sustaining life, nature and societies’, says Erasmus Professor Jun Borras. ‘Even though consensus remains difficult, this process keeps the issue on the global agenda and keeps key actors talking to each other at a time when democratizing land access faces growing political resistance.’
Academic, civil society and governments in dialogue
The Cartagena process brought together three parallel gatherings: an academic conference, a social movements summit and the official intergovernmental conference. This structure created space for dialogue between governments, grassroots organizations and scholars.
The academic conference alone brought together 410 researchers from 321 universities and research institutions across 55 countries.
ISS and EUR were among the key organizers of the academic conference, with support from the Erasmus Professors Programme. Researchers from ISS also served as advisers to the Colombian government in the organization of the intergovernmental summit. Several ISS PhD students and alumni contributed as organizers and speakers.
A platform that will continue
Participants in Cartagena agreed that the global land summit should become a more regular platform rather than taking place only once every two decades. Governments are now exploring the possibility of organizing the conference every three years, with Mexico, Indonesia and South Africa offering to host future editions.
While smaller in scale than international climate processes such as the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP), the summit represents an important step in strengthening global dialogue on democratizing land regimes.
A central rallying framework that has emerged from Cartagena is the need for land governance that is based on the inseparable, mutually reinforcing principles of land Redistribution, Recognition, Restitution and Regulation, or 4Rs.
For ISS and EUR, the event also highlighted the relevance of ongoing research on land politics and agrarian change, including the recently concluded European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant project RRUSHES-5, and a new ERC Synergy project, Land and Life in the Anthropocene: Landscape reform (LAND).
