Why attend ILDC ?
ILDC has, over the years, become one of the largest inclusive platforms on land and development in the Global South. Each edition has witnessed participation from hundreds of academic and policy researchers, whose papers have examined the many dimensions of land—across rural, urban, commons, forests, gender, technology, governance, and more.
Visibility
Visibility for your work before an audience of researchers, CSOs, governments, and practitioners
Feedback
Critical feedback from interdisciplinary perspectives
Networking
Networking and mentorship opportunities with leading scholars, govt officials, and institutions
Publication
Publication of a select set of submitted abstracts in Special Land Use Policy Journal Edition (2025–26)
ILDC pre and post-conference events
We have curated an exciting lineup of pre and post conference events, including deep-dive workshops, expert-led masterclasses, and field-visits. These sessions are designed to explore critical themes in-depth, providing attendees with valuable insights, practical skills, and unique networking opportunities to enrich their overall conference experience.
Around 70% of India’s rural population is directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture. However, agricultural lands across India and the Global South are undergoing rapid and complex transformations. These changes are driven by a multitude of interlinked factors, including land fragmentation, informal tenancy arrangements, climate variability, speculative land pressures, outward migration, and the changing aspirations of rural youth toward non-farm and alternative land-based livelihoods. According to the Agricultural Census (2015–16), the average landholding size in India has declined from 2.28 hectares in 1970–71 to 1.08 hectares, limiting economies of scale and reducing profitability for smallholders. Additionally, an estimated 30–40% of agricultural land is under informal or unrecorded lease arrangements, leaving tenant farmers vulnerable and without access to institutional credit, subsidies, or formal protections.
These pressures are further aggravated by environmental stress and economic uncertainty. The transition in land use has profound implications for food security, farm resilience, and the identity and dignity of farmers. Emerging patterns, often shaped by economic imperatives or systemic vulnerabilities, risk undermining the foundations of sustainable agriculture and inclusive rural development. At the same time, the track aims to explore these transitions and an opportunity to reimagine agricultural futures grounded in ecological sustainability, tenurial security, innovative farming practices, linking farm to market and agripreneurs and local food sovereignty.
Across India and the Global South, forests, pastures, wetlands, and coastal commons are under siege—from climate change, ecological degradation, land-use change, and extractive development. These landscapes, long stewarded by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs), are increasingly becoming sites of contestation—over tenure, governance, and the future of conservation.
As carbon markets and nature-based climate solutions expand into tribal and customary territories, new risks have emerged. Climate finance often moves faster than consent, legal clarity, or justice—raising concerns about carbon rights, fair benefit sharing, and the dispossession of commons in the name of sustainability and climate change mitigation. Project developers frequently operate without full understanding of local defacto tenure systems or the legal ‘de-jure’ land governance regimes. In many instances, carbon projects have bypassed free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC), and redefined land use without community mandate—jeopardizing livelihoods, resource rights, and long-standing stewardship systems.
This track interrogates the shifting terrain of commons governance, where climate action intersects with community rights and environmental justice. It reimagines conservation not as exclusion or enclosure, but as stewardship action anchored in local knowledge, ecological care labour, and traditional governance. It also opens space to examine how carbon project developers, climate financiers, and government actors can engage meaningfully and equitably with IPLCs—moving from extractive offsets to genuine partnerships.
India, the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter, has committed to ambitious climate goals under its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) as part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). As highlighted by the Land Gap Report, almost 1 in 2* Climate actions relate to land. And ≥40% of all land-related actions are direct land actions. These climate ambitions are deeply land-dependent. India will require an estimated 42.6 million hectares of land to implement its climate actions. Central to these ambitious targets, India’s strategy involves a significant shift toward renewable energy, with a commitment to achieving 40% non-fossil fuel-based power capacity and installing 500 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy by 2030. Meeting these targets particularly through solar, wind, and green hydrogen could require an estimated 5–6% of India’s total landmass, underscoring the critical intersection between energy transition and land use planning.
In a country where land is finite, fragmented, and deeply contested, India’s ambitious climate and development goals raise critical questions about land use. As land availability increasingly becomes a zero-sum game, allocating land to one sector often comes at the cost of another. This makes it essential to acknowledge the trade-offs involved and to explore balanced solutions. Transitions such as the expansion of renewable energy risk displacing people, undermining land-dependent livelihoods particularly among marginalised communities, delaying or stalling infrastructure projects, and leading to financial losses for developers and investors.
This track focuses on the climate land nexus, with particular attention to renewable energy deployment, land availability, land footprinting, the need for a robust land use policy, and appropriate valuation and compensation mechanisms acquiring land for climate actions and just transitions.
India is urbanizing rapidly, with its urban population expected to increase by 416 million by 2050, reaching 50% of the total population. Despite occupying only 3% of the land, cities contribute around 60% of the country’s GDP. However, they reflect deep inequalities, with modern infrastructure coexisting alongside informal settlements and inadequate services. The core challenge lies in improving land use and investment while addressing governance, social, political, and environmental constraints.
Government initiatives like JnNURM, AMRUT, and the Smart Cities Mission have aimed to enhance infrastructure, but sustainable service delivery remains lacking. Recent budgets have prioritized land record reforms through SSASCI to clarify ownership and improve planning. RERA, introduced in 2016 to regulate real estate and protect consumers, has made progress but still faces enforcement issues.
Private sector involvement is crucial but hampered by regulatory and planning challenges. Master plans often fall short, especially in managing peri-urban growth. Civil society raises concerns about inadequate participation, neglect of informal communities, and insufficient environmental safeguards in planning.
India’s urban future depends on harmonizing diverse interests—development, equity, investment, and sustainability. A shared, inclusive agenda supported by dialogue among policymakers, developers, civil society, and researchers is essential to shape more liveable, resilient cities.
India’s land administration is complex and multilayered, shaped by legacies of colonial land records, social and emotional attachments, legal pluralism, and a large presence of outdated, informal, and unrecorded tenures, disputes on land. While there has been a gradual shift toward individualisation of land rights, this legacy has created significant challenges in land access, use, and decision-making. The result is a land governance landscape often marked by confusion, opacity, and conflict. Over two-thirds of all civil cases in Indian courts are land-related, and such disputes take, on average, around 20 years to resolve, reflecting the deep entanglement of legal, administrative, and social complexities in land administration..
With the advancement of technology and the Government of India's ambitious plans for surveying and re-surveying land records, several flagship schemes such as DILRMP, SVAMITVA, and OLRSD are increasingly integrating tools like drones, GIS, blockchain, and AI to enhance accuracy and precision. With the aim of better public administration and public services. There is a use of technologies that promise improved efficiency and transparency. A fundamental question remains: can technical precision alone resolve the deep-rooted challenges of India’s complex land and tenure systems?
These socio-legal complexities raise important concerns about whether technological interventions alone can deliver better public services and administration or if they also create meaningful public value. This includes building trust in digital records, ensuring legal validity of digitized outcomes, enabling economic unlocking of land, government entitlements on land and whether these benefits are equitably distributed across regions and social groups, particularly considering disparities in digital literacy, education, and socio-economic demographics.
This track explores the dual role of technology in land administration: as a tool for modernization and as a lens to examine equity, data justice, and potential exclusions. It also emphasizes the need for multi-stakeholder engagement including communities, civil society, technologists, and government institutions to ensure inclusive and grounded reforms. It also underscores the importance of Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) frameworks that can assess the digital ecosystems and inform the phased adoption of new technologies and schemes, ensuring that innovation does not outpace institutional and social preparedness.
Land administration is fundamental to India's development, significantly influencing rural transformation, urban expansion, and the delivery of welfare services. Despite considerable progress in digitization and reforms, land governance in India faces persistent challenges due to systemic complexities. These complexities stem from colonial legacies, diverse legal frameworks, informal practices, overlapping jurisdictions, and critical gaps in capacity.
This track focuses on the urgent need for enhanced state capacity to foster inclusive, citizen-responsive, and climate-resilient land administration. It draws valuable insights from the "Capacity Building towards Inclusive Land Governance" program, a key initiative by IIM Ahmedabad and Landstack, implemented with YASHADA and supported by the Department of Land Resources, Ministry of Rural Development.
This session is designed as a dynamic knowledge-sharing platform, bringing together leaders from public administration, academia, and civil society. The aim is to explore what's truly involved in building land systems that are not only efficient and legally sound but also equitable and adaptable to India's evolving socio-economic landscape.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Stage 2: Call for Contributions (Abstracts/Presentations/Papers)
Announcement: August 10, 2025
Deadline: September 10, 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?
Are you a budding researcher, doctoral scholar, young academic, or a practitioner working on grounded land issues? Do you have insights, evidence, or analysis you’d like to share with a wider community that values knowledge beyond the academic silos?
We are thrilled to announce that the Call for Abstracts for the 9th India Land and Development Conference (ILDC 2025) opens on August 10, 2025 and closes on September 10, 2025!
ILDC Registration
Stage 1: Call for Panel/Session Proposals
Early Bird Registrations Begins: July 1, 2025
Deadline: July 31st, 2025
Status Update: August 15, 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.
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Fields in Transition: Securing Food, Farm Resilience, and Farmer's Livelihood
Around 70% of India’s rural population is directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture. However, agricultural lands across India and the Global South are undergoing rapid and complex transformations. These changes are driven by a multitude of interlinked factors, including land fragmentation, informal tenancy arrangements, climate variability, speculative land pressures, outward migration, and the changing aspirations of rural youth toward non-farm and alternative land-based livelihoods.According to the Agricultural Census (2015–16), the average landholding size in India has declined from 2.28 hectares in 1970–71 to 1.08 hectares, limiting economies of scale and reducing profitability for smallholders. Additionally, an estimated 30–40% of agricultural land is under informal or unrecorded lease arrangements, leaving tenant farmers vulnerable and without access to institutional credit, subsidies, or formal protections.
These pressures are further aggravated by environmental stress and economic uncertainty. The transition in land use has profound implications for food security, farm resilience, and the identity and dignity of farmers. Emerging patterns, often shaped by economic imperatives or systemic vulnerabilities, risk undermining the foundations of sustainable agriculture and inclusive rural development. At the same time, the track aims to explore these transitions and an opportunity to reimagine agricultural futures grounded in ecological sustainability, tenurial security, innovative farming practices, linking farm to market and agripreneurs and local food sovereignty.
Key themes
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Land tenure and food security in floodplains, drylands, and tribal areas
Informal tenancies, leasing, and landlessness and gender access to farms among small farmers
Climate-induced changes: soil erosion, saline ingress, declining productivity, Community resilience in food-producing ecosystems.
Land and agribusiness expansion, connecting farm to market, agriprenuers, innovative farming practices, agri tech innovators, producers collectivisation
Coastal farming communities and fishers’ land and livelihood rights
ILDC Partners
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