KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM CSW69
The sixty-ninth session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW69), held from 10 to 21 March 2025, marked a pivotal moment for advancing gender equality in the face of growing global challenges. As delegates and advocates gathered to assess progress since the landmark Beijing Declaration, ILC members reflected on the reasons why women's land rights should remain as a critical focus area requiring renewed commitment and innovative approaches.m line: Women's land rights require renewed commitment and innovative approaches.
Women's Land Rights: Fundamental Yet not sufficiently Addressed Since Beijing
In 1995, the Beijing Declaration brought much hope to women's rights and land rights advocates in particular, by recognising the central role of land rights in the realisation of women’s human rights, as well as their economic empowerment and the struggle for social justice. While tangible progress has been made over the past three decades and the international community has renewed its collective commitment to advancing women's land rights, CSW69 fell short of reaffirming the urgent need to secure women's land rights.
The Political Declaration failed to mention women’s land rights and to recognise how secure land tenure for women has moved from a peripheral concern to a recognised cornerstone of gender equality, economic empowerment and climate resilience. Women's land rights remain central to the broader women's rights agenda and represent one of the most consequential, yet incomplete, promises of the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action. Despite measurable legal reforms since Beijing, the persistent implementation gap demonstrates why ongoing advocacy must continue to position land rights as non-negotiable within a comprehensive women's rights framework, rather than as a separate technical issue. During the CSW69 Interactive dialogue on environmental conservation, protection, and rehabilitation, ILC members reaffirmed the need to revitalize states’ commitment to women’s land rights.
The representation of Grassroots Women is more important than ever
The ILC-Oxfam parallel event on grassroots women's leadership in advancing women's land rights transformed abstract policy discussions into accountable dialogues based on lived experience. Their testimonies of land dispossession, successful community-led resistance and innovative local solutions provided legitimacy and direction at a time when multilateral advocacy spaces remain largely inaccessible to many women from rural and historically marginalised communities. While there are many exciting discussions on climate justice, the inclusion of gender-responsive land indicators or successul stories on gender transformative approaches that ILC has been taking part in, ensuring rural and indigenous women's continued access to these forums is not just symbolic, but essential to developing effective responses to the intersecting crises affecting women, whose perspectives remain systematically underrepresented in international policy-making. The ongoing discussion on the revitalisation of the CSW should also be an opportunity to address, at least in part, such challenges and to find ways to maintain a unique and safe space for women's rights defenders and advocates.
Strategic partnership renewal amid backlash
CSW69 served as a critical platform for reinvigorating alliances and developing bold, coordinated responses to the documented increase in anti-gender movements and funding cuts affecting women's land initiatives worldwide. CSW69 created space for donors, multilateral institutions and civil society to discuss the importance of developing pragmatic funding mechanisms that protect core women's land rights work from politically motivated cuts. Such partnerships should include innovative approaches such as systems change and community-led approaches, South-South cooperation, and cross-movement solidarity between land rights advocates and other justice movements - demonstrating that periods of backlash can catalyze more resilient, interconnected advocacy rather than retreat. Around the world, initiatives such as the Stand For Her Land Campaign provide concrete pathways for implementing women's land rights commitments and demonstrate how actors ranging from state authorities to local community members can work in synergy to bring about positive change for millions of women.
The growing pressure to remove gender and environmental justice from discussions on women's rights would represent a serious setback on women’s land rights as it ignores the fundamental intersectionality of these issues, as women face unique barriers to land tenure that are directly linked to gender power dynamics and environmental vulnerability. When women lack secure land rights, they are disproportionately affected by climate change and environmental degradation, while being excluded from decision-making processes that could help protect both the land and their livelihoods. A strong and collective response from human rights and development advocates, civil society organisations, grassroots movements, philanthropists, allied governments and intergovernmental organisations would help preserve the hard-won gains on women’s land rights at the global, regional and national levels.
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