Growing cities face severe land use conflicts. Urban expansion and the densification of existing built areas are increasing the pressure on green spaces, which are key for climate change adaptation. Planning procedures embroiled in these land use conflicts are often complicated and slow. This is due to the increasing complexity in planning processes, which involve a multitude of stakeholders and decision-makers, whose responsibilities are not always entirely clear. Governance-oriented forms of decision making with horizontal structures are often required, but these also entail challenges.

Land consolidation is an instrument that readjusts land parcel shapes and reallocates land rights in order to minimize farmland fragmentation, optimize agricultural output, and generate optimal living and working conditions in rural areas. The optimization and reallocation algorithms typically rely on monetarized values of land parcels, soil quality, and compensation amounts. Yet, land management interventions also need instruments for socio-spatial optimization, which may be in conflict with the monetary ones. Many non-monetary values are qualitative in nature.

Land and water are vital resources for sustaining rural livelihoods and are critical for rural development as they form the basis of agriculture, the main economic activity for rural communities. Nevertheless, in most developing countries, land and water resources are unevenly distributed due to historical and socio-economic imbalances, hence the need for land reform policies to address these disparities. However, redistributing land without considering the interconnectedness of land and socio-ecological systems can compound existing food and water insecurity challenges.