Land governance is at the core of political and development discourses in Nepal, where historically unequal and discriminatory distribution of land has affected a large portion of the population. For a long time, Nepal was under a feudal system where a small number of landlords held most of the agricultural land. Rural farmers were then contracted on a tenancy, customary, and hereditary basis. Recently, however, the country initiated a land reform process to protect tenant farmers and ensure secure land tenure for landless Dalits and other people residing on informal and non-formal lands.

The constitution of Nepal has mandated that all three governments (federal, provincial, and local) have certain rights in relation to land governance, administration, and management. Practise, however, is very different from the theory due to a combined lack of subsequent policy measures, technical expertise, an earmarked budget, and a busy political agenda. Land administration and ownership in the western region of the country, for example, was complicated during the Maoist conflict. 

As a consequence, and despite reforms, a large amount of the country's agricultural land is still under the Guthi (trust) system, which is rooted within the Newar community indigenous to the Kathmandu Valley. The system has a special role in maintaining temples and traditional public spaces, as well as organising festivals and religious parades. This centuries-old trust system, usually led by families or specific communities, generates income from commonly owned lands, which makes thousands of peasant families who have cultivated significant portions of that land as mere tenants.

Women, lower castes, agricultural labourers, ex-Kamaiyas, Haliyas, Harawas and Charawas (bonded labourers) and landless people are still living in precarious situations, unable to claim formal rights over the land they occupy.