Be part of ILDC 2025
Whether you are a seasoned expert or a curious newcomer, ILDC invites you to contribute and learn. The upcoming call for abstracts, session proposals, and participation will open soon.
Let’s come together at ILDC 2025 to reimagine land and development through the lens of justice, inclusivity, sustainability, and transformation.
Stay tuned for more details on registration, session calls, and partnership and sponsoring opportunities.
Save the dates
18–20 November 2025
Ahmedabad Management Association (AMA), Gujarat
ILDC, continues to provide an unique and inclusive convergence platform for the inter-sectoral actors to engage in interdisciplinary conversation around all such land-matters, as increasingly land matters more for achieving sustainable development and climate resilience.
With a strong commitment to southern thinking, inclusivity, and collaboration, ILDC has emerged as a space that goes beyond technical conversations, creating a community of practice that values knowledge co-creation, grounded realities, and ethical engagement.
ILDC is Global South’s one of the biggest annual international conferences that connects conversations on land and development. By bringing together a diverse range of stakeholders — researchers, policymakers, practitioners, civil society actors, and private sector professionals — it catalyses collective reflection, learning, and action around critical land questions imperative for development, locally and globally.
After, moving from Delhi to Bengaluru and with last years in Pune, ILDC comes to historic and progressive city of Ahmedabad, with unique distinction of several prominent institutions working on and around diversity of land issues and disciplines, in government, academics, private sector, technology and CSO spaces, many being earlier partners and collaborators. In this city where tradition meets modernity, ILDC is looking forward to unprecedented participation and unparalleled conversations.
In the final stretch toward the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), ILDC 2025 highlights land not just as a resource, but as a site of power, identity, struggle, and opportunity. This year’s theme — “Centrality of Land and Sustainable Development” — foregrounds land as a pivotal driver of justice, resilience, and transformation across multiple sectors and geographies. As climate transitions intensify, cities expand, agrarian livelihoods shift, and indigenous and women’s rights gain global recognition, land remains central to enabling inclusive and sustainable futures.
Tracks and Dimensions
To strengthen the clarity, coherence, and regional relevance of its dialogues, ILDC 2025 introduces a Track-Based Structure that situates land at the heart of pressing developmental transitions. This structure allows for deeper engagement across geographic, institutional, and thematic domains, while ensuring cross-cutting equity concerns remain embedded throughout.
Each track embeds three overarching dimensions —Geographic Focus, Community Centering and South–South exchange—which cut across all tracks. These dimensions help unpack the economic, ecological, and social transformations centered on land. We encourage participants to engage with the tracks through one or more of these dimensions, and submit their proposals accordingly, drawing on these multi-layered perspectives.
Across all tracks and dimensions, issues of Gender, Youth, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs), and other marginal groups (such as Dalits, Adivasis, landless workers, fisherfolk, and pastoralists) are interwoven, recognizing their centrality in both experience and solution-making.
Stage 2: Call for Contributions (Abstracts/Presentations/Papers)
Announcement: August 10, 2025
Deadline: September 5, 2025
Status update: September 15, 2025
Following the confirmation of panel topics, we will open the Call for Contributions. This invites abstracts and presentations from both researchers and practitioners whose work aligns with the broader ILDC themes as well as the accepted panels/sessions. Contributors may choose to:
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Connect their submission to one of the approved panels from Stage 1
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Or propose independent contributions if none of the existing panels are a suitable fit
Who can apply?
Researchers, government officials, NGOs, community leaders, lawyers, tech innovators, youth networks, and others working at the intersection of land and development are warmly encouraged to apply. Collaborative proposals that cut across sectors or disciplines are especially welcome.
Stage 1: Call for Panel/Session Proposals
Early Bird Registrations Begins: July 1, 2025
Deadline: July 31st, 2025
Status Update: August 10, 2025
This stage invites individuals, institutions, and networks to propose panel or session ideas around the thematic direction of the conference. Submitters are encouraged to align their proposals with the core themes of ILDC 2025. Proposers are expected to serve as panel organizers and/or chairs. Once submitted, the Conference Program Committee will promptly review all proposals and notify applicants regarding the status of their submissions.
Submission Information
Who Can Apply?
Researchers, government officials, NGOs, community leaders, lawyers, tech innovators, youth networks, and others working at the intersection of land and development are warmly encouraged to apply. Collaborative proposals that cut across sectors or disciplines are especially welcome.
Submission Information
After, moving from Delhi to Bengaluru and with last years in Pune, ILDC comes to historic and progressive city of Ahmedabad, with unique distinction of several prominent institutions working on and around diversity of land issues and disciplines, in government, academics, private sector, technology and CSO spaces, many being earlier partners and collaborators. In this city where tradition meets modernity, ILDC is looking forward to unprecedented participation and unparalleled conversations.
In the final stretch toward the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), ILDC 2025 highlights land not just as a resource, but as a site of power, identity, struggle, and opportunity. This year’s theme — “Centrality of Land and Sustainable Development” — foregrounds land as a pivotal driver of justice, resilience, and transformation across multiple sectors and geographies. As climate transitions intensify, cities expand, agrarian livelihoods shift, and indigenous and women’s rights gain global recognition, land remains central to enabling inclusive and sustainable futures.
ILDC, continues to provide an unique and inclusive convergence platform for the inter-sectoral actors to engage in interdisciplinary conversation around all such land-matters, as increasingly land matters more for achieving sustainable development and climate resilience.
With a strong commitment to southern thinking, inclusivity, and collaboration, ILDC has emerged as a space that goes beyond technical conversations, creating a community of practice that values knowledge co-creation, grounded realities, and ethical engagement.
ILDC is Global South’s one of the biggest annual international conferences that connects conversations on land and development. By bringing together a diverse range of stakeholders — researchers, policymakers, practitioners, civil society actors, and private sector professionals — it catalyses collective reflection, learning, and action around critical land questions imperative for development, locally and globally.
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This track explores how agricultural lands are transforming due to land fragmentation, informal tenancy, climate variability, and speculative pressures. It emphasizes sustainable reforms through agroecology, tenant protections, and nature-based solutions (NbS).
Focus: Land’s central role in food security, agrarian livelihoods, and agro-ecological resilience.
Key themes
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Land tenure and food security in floodplains, drylands, and tribal areas
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Informal tenancies, leasing, and landlessness among small farmers
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Climate-induced changes: soil erosion, saline ingress, declining productivity
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Land grabs and agribusiness expansion
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Coastal farming communities and fishers’ land and livelihood rights
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Gendered access to agricultural land and commons in peri-urban and tribal areas
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Community resilience in food-producing ecosystems like wetlands and deltas
