Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how advocacy communities diagnose threats from land-based climate action, variably emphasising historical dispossession patterns or emerging governance challenges — and how these diagnostics shape competing pathways for land rights protection in climate governance.

Presentation long abstract

Since COP26's Forest Tenure Pledge through COP30's Intergovernmental Land Tenure Commitment, the land question has gained increasing visibility within climate governance. Diverse actors express concern over how climate mitigation strategies are accelerating land commodification and concentration, threatening land-dependent communities.

Behind this concern are advocacy communities of different kinds: global peasant movements, international solidarity organisations, Indigenous People and Local Community (IPLC) networks, climate justice organisations, institutional actors and engaged scholars. While sharing consensus over protecting local land rights, they defend different visions and mobilise different concepts—from land sovereignty to tenure security, climate justice, food sovereignty, land justice, and indigenous stewardship—each reflecting distinct values and political priorities. Those stressing historical continuities of domination and dispossession through framings like green colonialism call for radical transformation of climate action and rejection of market-based mechanisms. Others focus on governance gaps created by new carbon markets and rising financial actors, advocating for improved regulation, safeguards, and policy reforms within existing systems. Advocacy communities thus diverge in diagnostics and solutions: from rights-based approaches working within existing frameworks to demands for indigenous control over climate finance, or outright rejection of carbon markets.

Through discursive analysis of advocacy materials, formal policy declarations, and civil society manifestos from COP26 to COP30, this paper examines how advocacy communities diagnose land threats, what continuities and ruptures they emphasise, and how these diagnostics shape proposed solutions for land rights protection. The analysis reveals which strategic repertoires gain traction and what visions of land justice become visible—or remain silenced—in international climate governance.