Yet significant gender gaps in land tenure persist. Women continue to face barriers to owning, inheriting and controlling land due to discriminatory social norms, unequal power relations within households and communities, gaps in legal protections and weak implementation of existing laws. Access to justice and land administration systems also remains limited for many rural women. These challenges are often compounded for women experiencing intersecting forms of marginalization and discrimination, including Indigenous women, Afro-descendant women, migrant and displaced women, widows, elderly women, young women and women with disabilities. The explicit recognition of these intersecting inequalities in the ICARRD+20 declaration represents an important step forward.

Addressing these structural constraints requires stronger policy coherence across legal, institutional and governance frameworks. Global agreements already provide important guidance. SDG target 5.a, which reflects years of advocacy by committed organizations and actors including FAO, calls on governments to ensure women’s equal rights to economic resources, including ownership and control over land. Complementing this, the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGT) provide policy guidance for gender-equitable land governance, while the Voluntary Guidelines on Gender Equality and Women’s and Girls’ Empowerment (VG-GEWGE) place specific emphasis on addressing structural forms of discrimination and inequality embedded in laws, policies, social norms, attitudes, harmful customary practices and gender stereotypes.

Translating these commitments into meaningful change requires sustained political will, institutional capacity and investment. Legal reforms alone are rarely sufficient. In many countries, statutory protections coexist with customary tenure systems that continue to shape land allocation, inheritance and community governance. Without deliberate efforts to address gender biases embedded in these systems and ensure coherence, women’s rights may be recognized in law but remain constrained in practice.

The recommendations emerging from ICARRD+20 aim to reinforce existing global frameworks while promoting more inclusive governance of land, fisheries, forests and water resources. From a gender perspective, several aspects are particularly noteworthy. First, the recommendations emphasize strengthening the implementation of international frameworks that incorporate gender equality principles, including the VGGT and the VG-GEWGE, to ensure women’s equal access to, ownership and control of land and natural resources.

Second, they highlight the importance of strengthening participation and representation of rural actors in land governance processes. Women remain underrepresented in land governance institutions and community decision-making structures. Ensuring that participation mechanisms are inclusive and that women are meaningfully represented must be a priority of agrarian reform.

Third, the recommendations underscore the need for affirmative measures to address structural inequalities in access to land and productive resources. Targeted measures, such as reforms that strengthen women’s property rights, including through joint titling, financial incentives and quotas, and address discriminatory inheritance and marital property regimes, are necessary to level the playing field.

Another positive element is the recognition of legal pluralism and the need to harmonize statutory and customary tenure systems within governance frameworks grounded in equality and non-discrimination. While customary systems often provide social legitimacy and collective governance mechanisms, they may also perpetuate gender inequalities if safeguards are absent. Harmonization efforts offer an important opportunity to strengthen women’s land rights while respecting legitimate community-based governance arrangements.

Equally important is the recognition that land governance must be connected to broader environmental and climate agendas. Land, water, forests and biodiversity are deeply interconnected, and their sustainable management is central to climate resilience and agrifood systems transformation. Women often play critical roles in natural resource management and in maintaining local knowledge systems and community-led adaptation practices. Integrating gender perspectives into environmental governance is therefore essential for achieving both sustainability and environmental and social justice.

The declaration also recognizes that access to land alone is not sufficient. It must be accompanied by women’s effective access to financial services, technologies and productive support services, as well as health services and care infrastructure. Ensuring women’s ability to claim inheritance and marital property rights and addressing structural barriers that limit their participation and autonomy in rural areas, including disproportionate responsibilities for reproductive work, remain equally critical.

Finally, the declaration affirms that strengthening the evidence base is essential to measure progress or lack of thereof and for accountability. Initiatives such as the Global Land Observatory are important to monitor the state of land tenure and governance. Much of the gender-related data and analysis in these efforts draws on countries’ reporting on SDG indicators 5.a.1 and 5.a.2, highlighting the role the SDG framework can play in generating evidence, informing policy reforms, strengthening accountability and facilitating dialogue and policy coherence across sectors.

Encouragingly, the conference brought together a broad coalition of actors, including governments, social movements, academia and development partners, reflecting renewed momentum around agrarian reform and equitable land governance. Representatives of famers, Indigenous Peoples, fisherfolks, pastoralists and farm workers, across genders, generations, races, ethnicities, and nationalities, together with academics called for advancing the mutually reinforcing principles of land Recognition, Redistribution, Restitution and Regulation, the “4Rs.”

From a gender perspective, these principles offer important entry points for strengthening women’s rights to land, water and natural resources, ensuring that women’s land rights are recognized, that women benefit equally from redistribution and restitution processes, and safeguarding their rights against elite, corporate and male capture.

While ICARRD+20 reflects growing momentum around equitable land governance, stronger language and explicit commitments to dismantling structural forms of discrimination would have further strengthened the declaration and its prospects to advance gender and social justice. The challenge now is to translate global commitments into concrete reforms, programmes and investments that secure women’s land rights in practice.

If land is inherently political, so too are women’s land rights.