Promoting a gender-just economy through stronger rights to land and natural resources for women

Access to, use and control over land and natural resources are central to women’s livelihoods, wellbeing, cultural identity and resilience. These rights are also essential to achieving gender justice and building economies that value care, equity and ecological balance.

Across many contexts, however, women’s rights to land and natural resources are being eroded. Large-scale land-based investments – including for agriculture and extractive activities – are intersecting with environmental degradation and climate change to reshape land use and governance.

These overlapping pressures often restrict community land rights, weaken customary governance systems, and undermine food security and cultural ties to territory.

The impacts are particularly severe among Indigenous, pastoralist and Afro-descendant communities. As ecosystems are degraded and access to land and natural resources becomes more contested, women from these communities face growing challenges in sustaining livelihoods, caring for households and asserting their rights as land users and decision makers.

Investment models which introduce large-scale monoculture further weaken women's resilience by reducing habitat and soil biodiversity, encroaching on traditional farming practices and limiting spaces for applying traditional knowledge. 

At the same time, challenges to neoliberal and patriarchal systems are creating opportunities to rethink governance and economic paradigms. Communities and women’s movements are mobilising to defend land rights, assert alternative development pathways and challenge economic models that marginalise local knowledge and undervalue care, culture and collective stewardship.

Seizing this moment could help secure women’s rights and support more gender-just, climate-resilient and inclusive governance systems.

What is IIED doing?

Building on earlier work to amplify women’s voices in land governance in sub-Saharan Africa, IIED has designed a comprehensive programme to promote a gender-just economy by strengthening women’s rights to land and natural resources.  

This is particularly targeted at women from socially marginalised communities, including Indigenous, pastoralist, forest, hunter gatherer and Afro-descendant communities. The programme aims to:

• Strengthen evidence: we are conducting a stocktake of how the intertwined impacts of economic pressures, environmental degradation and climate change affect women’s land and resource rights
• Explore governance linkages: we are analysing the intersection between land rights, economic transformation, climate governance and shifting power dynamics.
• Document community perspectives: we are producing case studies from local communities across sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America
• Engage diverse stakeholders: drawing on academic research, national policy documents and interviews with key informants, we are grounding our findings in real-world contexts
• Foster a community of practice: we are connecting partners and practitioners across regions to exchange strategies, amplify women’s voices and strengthen collective advocacy, and
• Promote systemic change: we are identifying pathways for a gender-just economy that secures women’s rights to land and natural resources. 

In the first phase of this project, IIED has collaborated with the International Land Coalition (ILC) and the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) and local organisations in six countries – the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Peru, Tanzania, Uganda, and Colombia – to co-develop written and video case studies examining how climate change and development pressures are affecting community land rights, particularly for women. 

IIED has also brought together women land rights defenders from Kenya, Uganda, Peru and Colombia during the ILC Global Land Forum in Bogota in June 2025 to share strategies and explore opportunities for joint advocacy.

In late 2025, IIED published a series of case studies, some of which are also translated into Spanish and French, exploring how climate change, economic pressures and gender inequalities intersect to undermine women's access to land and natural resources. 

They highlight how Indigenous, pastoralist and Afro-descendant women are responding by transforming land governance, challenging extractive economic models and building the foundations for gender-just futures rooted in rights, traditional knowledge and territory.