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Recognized Locally, Invisible Globally: Land Tenure

Published on: April 28, 2026

Customary land rights are legally recognized across most of Sub Saharan Africa. International finance still can’t see them. That’s where we ended up after Alberto Cottica from UNDP asked us a question at ChangeNow we couldn’t answer in five minutes: does land tenure reform speed up the take-up of regenerative agriculture?

He emailed afterward, and the exchange continued for two weeks. The longer we sat with it, the more we realized the honest answer wasn’t going to fit on a slide.

…So, here it is.

Enabler, not catalyst

Land tenure helps, but we wouldn’t call it a catalyst. Enabler is the better word, and in our work that distinction matters.

A farmer who isn’t confident they’ll still be on their land in five years won’t plant trees or restore soil that takes a decade to come back. The system around them already rewards the short cycle, and without tenure security to back a long horizon move, there’s nothing pulling them out of it.

Tenure security shifts that horizon and opens the possibility of long term thinking, but it doesn’t make long term thinking happen on its own. That part depends on whether markets exist to pay for what gets grown, whether seedlings are affordable, and whether inputs work the way they’re supposed to. Without those, secure tenure becomes the right to keep doing what you were already doing.

Where tenure becomes a wall

Most countries won’t issue environmental permits for restoration projects without legal proof of land rights, and some also require a full social and environmental impact assessment, with land documentation near the top of the application stack in either case.

No documents, no permit. The quality of the project doesn’t really enter into it.

The translation problem

In many Sub Saharan African countries, customary tenure is legally recognized, and communities hold real, often centuries old rights to land without formal titles. Those rights are unambiguous on the ground, but they don’t look like the rights international finance, certifiers, and carbon methodologies are trained to read.

So a community can have clear authority over a piece of land that the neighbors recognize and the local administration recognizes, while the bank funding a restoration project from abroad still cannot see it.

Alberto put it back to us in his reply:

“In a globalized and unequal world, what constitutes proof of land tenure is determined by global institutions. If the paperwork is not right by the yardstick of those institutions, the entire development machine cannot function.“

Kenya, and the fences

In Kenya, we watched Maasai herders receive formal title to land their families had moved cattle across for generations. And then build fences.

Formal title is, at its base, the legal right to keep others off your land, and fencing is what that right looks like on the ground. For the Maasai, without the fence, neighbors could dispute the title, agribusiness could chip at the edges, and the protection that formal rights were meant to provide would slowly unravel. The fence was the title made physical and defensible.

But those same fences ran across wildlife corridors that animals had used since long before any of us drew lines on a map, and migration patterns shifted, while some were breaking entirely.

And it’s important went wrong. The Maasai used their title the way title is meant to be used, and the corridors closed because the system was working.

Same right, different scales

At the parcel scale, secure rights enable regeneration: a farmer who trusts they’ll still be there in ten years plants the tree, builds the soil, fixes the watershed. At the landscape scale, the same right can do the opposite, because the fence that makes a farm legible to investors is the fence that breaks the wildlife corridor.

Both are tenure working as designed, and the regen ag conversation usually has room for one of these and not the other.

So… What’s the answer?

Land tenure does different work at different scales. At the parcel level, it decides whether a farmer commits to long horizon practices; at the project level, whether permits get issued; at the landscape level, whether the systems regenerative agriculture is trying to rebuild stay intact.

It’s the same lever doing different work depending on where you stand, and most of the conversation is still standing in one place.

Big thanks to Alberto Cottica (UNDP) for the question that prompted this. If land tenure or regenerative project development is something you’re working on in your own context, we’d be glad to hear from you.

Sources & inspiration

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