Land Governance, Property Rights, and Resilient Livelihoods for Food Security

In the context of climate change and rapid factor mobility, the urban and rural dual structure and evolving land institutions in developing countries jointly shape the stability and sustainability of food systems. Fragmented farmland constrains scale economies and mechanization, idle homestead plots create spatial mismatches, and use control and transfer rules redraw the boundary between protection and utilization. Land governance and property rights are pivotal for food security and rural livelihood resilience. Clear, stable, and tradable rights lower transaction costs, enable moderate-scale operations and long-term investment, and open space for embedded social services. At the same time, digital governance and ecological compensation reshape factor allocation and production. Digital titling, parcel networking, and remote sensing strengthen identifiability and governability, enabling fine-grained management, targeted subsidies, and risk alerts. Performance-based incentives internalize externalities and steer production toward green, low-carbon, and resilient trajectories.

Despite recent progress, there are still three gaps. Firstly, in developing countries with a dual urban-rural structure, there is limited causal evidence on how property rights protection, land consolidation, and homestead policies affect farmers' production choices, acceptance of socialized services, and livelihood resilience. Secondly, the distribution effects of digital land governance and ecological compensation on small farmers and new agricultural entities are still difficult to determine, especially in terms of yield stability, income diversification, and shock absorption. Thirdly, the relationship between landscape fragmentation and household decision-making is relatively weak in the comprehensive data measurement.

This collection seeks to narrow these gaps in research by combining quasi-experimental designs such as DiD and event studies with microscopic investigations, administrative records, and plot-level remote sensing. We welcome evaluations of socialized service systems such as machinery, promotion, finance, and insurance, as well as evaluations of policy tools such as land ownership, transfer markets, integration, rural revitalization, digital cadastral, ecological compensation, and climate risk insurance. The goal is to provide actionable, evidence-based insights for the land, livelihood, and food security sectors. This series welcomes interdisciplinary research that links land systems with farmer behavior, socialized services, agricultural resources and environmental outcomes, and food systems, involving agriculture, economics, environmental science, and remote sensing. We encourage original research using advanced analytics, including machine learning, causal inference, Bayesian modeling, and data fusion for surveys, administrative records, and land parcel-level remote sensing. We also welcome rigorous scrutiny and policy-oriented commentary that links evidence to practice.

We particularly encourage contributions on the following themes (but not limited to):

• Land ownership and farmers' livelihood resilience

• Vacant homesteads and rural residential area renewal

• Digital agriculture, remote sensing, and agricultural production transformation

• Social service system and rural livelihood resilience

• Climate risk, food security, and farmers' livelihood resilience

• Green farming, soil health, and low-carbon agriculture

• Land use and agricultural production efficiency

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: land governance, property rights, livelihood resilience, food security, digital agriculture, efficiency

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.