A Joint analysis report from ATI (Colombia, LATAM) and ESG and Data for Good Center of Excellence (Egypt, MENA)
Introduction: The momentum of the Earth and the imperative of systemic sustainability
After two decades of relative silence in multilateral dialogue spaces, the Second International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20) in Cartagena has marked a fundamental milestone in the global discussion on land tenure and the transformation of food systems. This encounter has not only served to reactivate the principles of 2006 but also updates the responsible governance of land as a strategic public investment with direct social, economic, and environmental benefits.
For global leaders and decision-makers under ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) frameworks, the message is blunt: the management of land and water can no longer be seen as an isolated sectoral policy. Land has ceased to be a static financial asset to become the axis of climate stability and global food sustainability.
I. Strategic pillars: A transversal and global analysis
This analysis is based on the need to move beyond administrative metrics and understand that agrarian reform is a challenge of governance for life.
1. Land justice: From static property to integral territory Agrarian reform in the 21st century must go beyond the simple redistribution of hectares to focus on the architecture of power over the territory. Real justice implies recognizing that collective and communal property models are proven mechanisms for stabilizing ecosystems and avoiding the land fragmentation that generates inefficiency and unproductivity.
This challenge unites distant latitudes; while in the MENA region the wisdom of nomadic pastoralists demonstrates that sovereignty resides in routes and access to water, in the Andes, communities manage the land according to the pulse of marshes and wetlands. We propose transitioning towards legal frameworks that protect transhumance and collectivity, preventing rigid laws of private property from stifling inherently sustainable life models.
2. Climate Resilience and “Acuatorios” Resilience is not designed at a desk; it is heard in the territory and is based on the protection of ecosystems. It is imperative that land governance integrates “Acuatorios” (water territories) and “Maritorios” (sea territories). The protection of “water factories,” such as the Colombian Massif, must take precedence over extractive interests, recognizing that water and food are the true global public utility. Agroecology is an integral way of relating to the land that must be the axis of climate mitigation. Absolute protection of native and creole seeds is necessary as the basis for food sovereignty and the planet’s genetic biodiversity.
3. Sustainable Food systems and Sovereignty The success of a food system is not only metric (security) but political (sovereignty): ensuring who decides what is planted and how it is distributed. It is fundamental to have specialized land-use planning figures to shield food production against mining and real estate expansion—a model applicable to any region with a scarcity of fertile soil.
II. Strategic recommendations for a global development agenda
Based on ATI’s expertise, dialogue with organizations from the Global South, and the results of the analysis spaces within ICARRD+20, we consider the following recommendations for the future of agrarian reforms in different regions of the world:
- Prioritization of collective titling: Collective property serves as the only effective shield against land grabbing and real estate speculation, stabilizing strategic ecosystems in vulnerable regions.
- Inclusion of the care economy: It is vital to recognize, remunerate, and articulate the work of rural women (care of families, seeds, and animals) in macroeconomic policies. Women represent more than 80% of care work in the world; without their empowerment, global economic stability is unfeasible.
- Implementation of specialized agrarian jurisdictions: We recommend that States strengthen formal justice systems with specialized judges who resolve territorial conflicts, guaranteeing the legal security necessary for rural development.
- Autonomy and generational integration: Facilitate access for rural youth to land and technology, recognizing them as political subjects with the capacity for self-governance, and not just as cheap labor.
- Reform of market barriers: Eliminate the bureaucratic and tax burdens that stifle peasant, indigenous, and Afro-descendant associations, allowing public procurement to directly benefit families, organizations, and rural food-producing communities.
- Medicinal sovereignty and integral health: Decriminalize ancestral knowledge about sacred plants as part of an integral health approach that interconnects humans, animals, and the environment.
- Mitigation of “green grabbing”: There is a technical alert regarding “green” transition initiatives, such as certain carbon credits, which can lead to new forms of dispossession if they do not guarantee that the wealth generated is reinvested in the territory. The integrity of ESG reports depends on these initiatives not being mere marketing strategies but processes with verifiable territorial impact.
- Normative standardization: It is necessary to elevate fragile administrative resolutions to framework laws for land-use planning, ensuring that progress in protecting areas of food and environmental interest is binding against extractive activities that compromise vital water resources.
Conclusion: Governance as a guarantee for the future
In conclusion, the balance of ICARRD+20 demonstrates that sustainability and social peace are sub-products of coherent territorial governance. For governments, companies, and specialists, the challenge lies in transitioning from a reactive compliance model to a proactive strategy that recognizes local autonomy and knowledge as strategic assets. Global stability in the 21st century is not guaranteed by fences, but by solid technical bridges between decision-makers and the reality of territories of life.
This paper offers a joint analysis from two organizations working at the intersection of Sustainable Development and ESG frameworks.
In the Global South: ATI, with more than 41 years of work in territorial development, food sovereignty, and agroecological governance in Colombia, and the ESG and Data for Good Center of Excellence at The Arab Academy for Management, Banking and Financial Sciences, working on and ESG adaptation in the MENA region. Our central argument is that the most significant contribution of ICARRD+20 lies not in its policy recommendations, but in the analytical convergence it revealed between territorial governance systems in Latin America and MENA, a convergence that current ESG frameworks are structurally unable to capture.
I. Sovereignty as relational governance: beyond the property paradigm
Contemporary ESG frameworks operationalize land-related social risk largely through property rights indicators: title security, legal recognition, protection from displacement. This approach, while necessary, reflects a concept of sovereignty that is fundamentally static: sovereignty as ownership, governance as registration.
What ICARRD+20 made visible, and what our combined research and field experience confirms, is that the most resilient territorial governance systems in the Global South are organized around a different logic: sovereignty as the guaranteed right to manage relationships between communities and the ecosystems that sustain them. This includes access to seasonal water sources, mobility along pastoralist routes, collective stewardship of native seed systems, and decision-making authority over land use that is not reducible to individual ownership.
In the Colombian Andes, communities in the high-altitude zones of the Colombian Massif govern land according to the rhythms of wetland systems and seasonal water cycles. The Massif feeds eight major river systems serving millions of people. Its governance is not primarily a question of who owns the land, but of who holds decision-making authority over the water relationships the land mediates.
While in Morocco, the Arganeraie Biosphere Reserve of southwestern offers a compelling case where Amazigh communities sustain biodiversity through the Agdal system’s seasonal forest governance and the Tanast water-sharing mechanism, together constituting governance architectures that have proven resilient in the face of climate volatility.
The analytical implication is significant. ESG frameworks that measure land governance exclusively through property-based indicators will consistently misread the governance
quality of precisely those systems that have proven most effective at ecosystem stabilization and community resilience. Collective and communal tenure models, transhumance systems, and water territory governance are not pre-modern anomalies to be formalized. They are functional governance architectures that require protection, not replacement.
II. Participatory data as methodological response to infrastructure gaps
A persistent challenge in applying ESG frameworks to territorial contexts in the Global South is the absence of conventional data infrastructure. This is not primarily a technical limitation to be solved through investment in monitoring systems. It reflects the structural conditions of territories where state presence has been historically weak and where community knowledge has functioned as the primary information system.
ATI has developed over eight years a hybrid methodology combining participatory data collection, multi-stakeholder voice integration, and alternative guarantee systems to produce verifiable social impact measurement in precisely these conditions. Applied across 130 markets and more than 3,000 farming families in Colombia, this methodology has demonstrated that participatory data not only fills infrastructure gaps but generates qualitatively different information: community-validated, contextually grounded, and more predictive of long-term resilience than conventional proxy indicators.
The ESG and Data for good Center of Excellence is advocating through its four key pillars: Capacity Building, Ecosystem Synergies, Community protection and Crafted Innovation, a seamless empowering journey for all Ecosystem players to utilize Data for social good and achieving Sustainable Development. The COE is creating space for domain leaders and decision makers for discussions to create and capitalize on operational solutions.
The convergence between these methodologies points toward a broader proposition: that the data gap in territorial ESG measurement is not a problem of quantity but of epistemology. Standard-setters who frame this as a data collection challenge will invest in the wrong solutions. What is required is the formal recognition of participatory and community-generated data as legitimate inputs into ESG reporting, with appropriate validation frameworks that reflect territorial realities rather than importing assumptions from contexts with fundamentally different information architectures.
III. Green grabbing and the structural vulnerability of ESG reporting
ICARRD+20 produced a technical alert that warrants direct attention from ESG practitioners and standard setters. A significant and growing category of green transition initiatives, including certain carbon credit schemes, conservation finance mechanisms, and renewable energy land acquisition projects, is generating new forms of territorial dispossession. Communities lose effective decision-making authority over their land. Wealth generated by the territory is captured externally. And the operation is documented in ESG reports as evidence of environmental and social performance.
In Egypt, National Climate Change Strategy 2050: The strategy serves as Egypt’s Roadmap for achieving low-emission, sustainable development. Its core objectives include
fostering low-emission economic growth, enhancing resilience and adaptation, improving Climate Governance, and securing Climate Financing.
From a different regional lens, what is evident in Colombia and across the Global South is the absence of regulatory frameworks capable of controlling these initiatives, setting limits on their territorial reach, and monitoring the impacts they generate on communities and governance systems.
The structural problem is that current ESG reporting frameworks lack the indicators necessary to distinguish between genuine territorial investment and green grabbing. The S in ESG, as currently operationalized, does not capture whether wealth generated by a territorial asset is reinvested in the community that governs it, whether community decision-making authority has been maintained or transferred, or whether the environmental performance being reported is built on or despite the displacement of existing governance systems.
This is not a marginal compliance question. It is a structural integrity problem for ESG reporting as a whole. As green finance scales, the risk of ESG-validated dispossession scales with it. Standard-setters have a technical obligation to develop indicators that make this distinction visible.
Conclusions and recommendations for Regulators and decision makers
The convergence between territorial governance challenges in Latin America and MENA, as surfaced by ICARRD+20 and confirmed by our combined field experience, points toward three specific recommendations for ESG standard-setters and development agencies:
Expand the property paradigm. Land governance indicators must be extended beyond property title security to capture relational sovereignty: access rights, collective tenure, transhumance systems, and community decision-making authority over resource relationships. GRI, SASB, and CSRD adaptation frameworks should develop specific disclosure requirements for these dimensions.
Formalize participatory data as legitimate ESG input. Standard-setters should develop validation frameworks that recognize community-generated and participatory data as credible inputs into ESG reporting, with appropriate quality criteria adapted to contexts of limited conventional data infrastructure. This is a methodological necessity, not a political concession.
Develop green grabbing indicators. ESG reporting frameworks must include specific indicators that distinguish territorial reinvestment from extraction, and that capture changes in community decision-making authority as a result of green transition initiatives. Without these, ESG reporting risks becoming an instrument of legitimation for new forms of dispossession.
ICARRD+20 demonstrated that coherent territorial governance is not a precondition for sustainability. It is sustainability. For governments, development agencies, and ESG practitioners, the task is to build the analytical and methodological tools adequate to that reality.
Global stability in the 21st century is not guaranteed by compliance frameworks. It is built by recognizing the governance intelligence that territories have already developed, and creating the conditions for it to function.
About ATI:
ATI, Asociación de Trabajo Interdisciplinario is a Colombian non-governmental organization (NGO) with over 40 years of history. The organization is dedicated to the defense and promotion of Human Rights, social equity, and the strengthening of democracy and peaceful coexistence. ATI’s mission focuses on contributing to the construction of territorial peace in Colombia. Its work is centered on key thematic areas and core ESG efforts such as Decent Work, Environmental Justice, Food Sovereignty and Autonomy, and Social and Solidarity Economy. The organization employs an interdisciplinary methodology that supports community organizational processes and actively participates in various networks and alliances to turn its objectives into impactful reality.